HONG KONG, May 28 (Reuters) – Small biotech firms “latch onto” AI more quickly than bigger firms, the head of \u200cChinese tech giant Tencent’s healthcare division said on \u200cThursday, as more businesses embrace AI to improve efficiency.<\/p>\n
Pharmaceutical companies are also increasingly \u200bturning to AI to accelerate research and development, betting on new modeling tools and automated labs to improve efficiency and slash costs as well as drug development timelines.<\/p>\n
Drugmakers including Novo Nordisk \u200cand Eli Lilly have \u2060announced AI-related collaborations with technology firms.<\/p>\n
“When you have less people, when you need to do more, \u2060you tend to figure out more efficient ways of doing things,” Tencent Healthcare President Alex Ng told Reuters.<\/p>\n
“AI is definitely something \u200bthat they \u200blatch onto very quickly,” he \u200bsaid. For very big \u200cpharmaceutical companies, however, with elaborate organisation and specified workflows, just adding an AI will sometimes not be successful, Ng said.<\/p>\n
Industry forecasts suggest that the use of machine learning to optimize target discovery, design molecules and streamline clinical trial planning could halve \u200cearly-stage development timelines and costs within \u200bthe next three to five years, \u200bReuters has previously reported.<\/p>\n
Ng \u200balso said people have become more positive \u200cabout embracing AI and what it \u200bcan accomplish as \u200bthe technology improves.<\/p>\n
“I think the culture and the environment and the discussion has changed so much that I \u200bthink a lot \u200cof people are a lot more positive,” Ng said.<\/p>\n
(Reporting \u200bby Andrew Silver in Shanghai, additional reporting by Hong \u200bKong newsroomEditing by Tomasz Janowski)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HONG KONG, May 28 (Reuters) – Small biotech firms “latch onto” AI more quickly than bigger firms, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":671672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[97,252,253,293040,34745,175878,35401,293039],"class_list":["post-671671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare","tag-healthcare-division","tag-pharmaceutical-companies","tag-technology-firms","tag-tencent","tag-tencent-healthcare-president-alex-ng"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/671672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}