Stakeholders Advocate AI Adoption In Pharmaceutical Industry

Stakeholders in the health sector have disclosed that it takes about 10 to 15 years to produce new drugs, while urging the pharmaceutical industry in Africa to embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI), to reduce the production time.

Stakeholders made the call at a discussion on X, titled: ‘promoting the development and adoption of locally produced AI solutions for healthcare in Africa’, hosted by Science Development Network (scidev.net) in collaboration with CPHIA.

For instance, the founder/CEO of Advantage Health Africa, Abimbola Adebakin, revealed that, it cost about $2.5billion for pharmaceutical companies to produce a new medicine, adding that with the time and huge resources spent on new drug production, it is sad to note that the success for clinical trial is less than 15 per cent.

The biggest challenge in Nigeria right now are access to medicines and affordability, the CEO said, adding that, Nigerians are lamenting the high cost of drugs.  Most sick Nigerians are missing their doses or completely shutting down as they are not taking their medication, due to high cost of drugs, she posited.

“We can attribute this challenge to many reasons, but one certainly is our vulnerability and our over dependence as a country and as a continent to importation of medicines into our continent. This is indeed a problem of demand solutions for those of us that are innovators and as such, I think we can start to deploy AI in the area of drug production, to tackle this challenge,” she stated.

If innovators can apply AI to drug production  and other verticles like radiology, diagnosis and public health, it will accelerate Africa’s inclusion in the supply chain system, help the continent to address the healthcare needs of its increasing population and reduce dependency on Asia and India for its medicines, Adebakin assured.

“In essence, AI can play a key role in solving our challenges in the health sector. Imagine if we can cut down drug production time from 10 to 15 years down to one year; imagine if we can cut down the cost of producing new drug from $2.5billion to 10 per cent of that figure and imagine if we can increase the chances of success rate of clinical trials from 15 per cent to about 70 per cent! AI can make these happen. Innovators in Africa need to see how they can deploy AI to achieving this, as it will help cut down the high cost of drugs in Africa.

“Imagine when we can apply AI to tackle all three to give us efficiency and to catalyse drug production. If Africa is going to leapfrog and overcome its inertia, I think now is the time for those who are involved in innovating with AI to tackle this problem and others in the pharma sector all across the value chain,” she advised.

In her opening remarks, the regional editor, Sub Saharan Africa, scidev.net, Ogechi Ekeanyanwu averred that, the aim of the discussion is to bridge the gap between technology and health care future in Sub Saharan Africa.