AI in Healthcare

Today's Stories

1. 1

   Pfizer licenses AI software from startup Chai Discovery to speed up drug development

   Pfizer signed a licensing deal with Chai Discovery to use AI software that designs antibodies (proteins that fight diseases) more quickly than traditional methods. The partnership announced in early June gives Pfizer early access to Chai's AI models that can predict how new medicines will work. This could significantly reduce the time it takes to develop new drugs, which typically takes over a decade.

   Patients could get access to new treatments faster as AI helps pharmaceutical companies design medicines more efficiently.

2. 2

   Eli Lilly invests in Abridge to expand AI beyond doctor's notes into billing and insurance

   Eli Lilly invested in Abridge, a $5.3 billion startup that uses AI to automatically transcribe and summarize doctor visits. Abridge is now expanding beyond clinical notes into medical billing, drug trial management, and real-time insurance claim processing. The company wants to become an operating system for medicine, handling administrative tasks that currently slow down healthcare.

   Doctor visits could become more efficient with less paperwork, and insurance claims might get processed faster as AI handles routine administrative tasks.

3. 3

   Japanese pharmaceutical company Nxera joins global AI research consortium with Amazon and Microsoft

   Nxera Pharma joined OpenFold, a nonprofit research group that develops open-source AI tools for drug discovery, alongside tech giants Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and NVIDIA. The consortium announced on June 10th aims to make AI drug discovery tools freely available to researchers worldwide. Multiple pharmaceutical companies are now collaborating to accelerate AI-powered medicine development.

   Medical research could advance faster as pharmaceutical companies share AI tools instead of each developing their own from scratch.

4. 4

   AI drug discovery leaders warn US funding cuts could hurt competitiveness

   Executives from companies like Lila Sciences and NVIDIA warned that proposed cuts to US health research funding could put America behind other countries in AI-powered drug discovery. They told Fortune that the combination of AI and biology could determine which countries lead in healthcare innovation for decades. The warning comes as global competition intensifies in using AI to develop new medicines.

   The US could lose its leadership in developing new medicines if government research funding gets cut while other countries invest heavily in AI healthcare tools.