How humanised machine learning is giving the life sciences industry a shot in the arm

The life sciences industry currently finds itself facing a perfect storm of challenges — from society’s rising concern about health costs to changes in the physician’s role


The next generation of accessible machine learning platforms will be crucial in helping departments from R&D to commercial to unlock the full value of their data, Mind Foundry Life Sciences Adviser, David Bennett, explains.

Research from Deloitte shows that productivity and R&D returns in biopharma companies have dropped to their lowest levels in nine years. The conundrum for these companies is where the R&D burden should fall and they are continually evaluating whether to in-house, outsource to smaller companies or involve academia in the process with a view to pursuing automation.

All this is at a time of an emerging and shifting dynamic of rising payer – or formulary – power while physician’s prescribing influence decreases, and the cost of cutting edge healthcare begins to exceed society’s willingness to pay.

Meanwhile larger, more agile and tech-focused companies such as Google and Amazon are sizing up the life sciences space with an eye to discontinuous disruption of the established order. These disruptors bring extensive financial clout and proven expertise with emerging technologies as a key enabler and differentiator – but technology also holds the key to ‘traditional’ life sciences companies fighting back.

Machine learning to the rescue

How can the life sciences sector as a whole boost productivity, reduce the time to market and unlock the full value of their data? The answer lies with pharma’s ability to successfully internalise and operationalise the promise of AI and machine learning and move it beyond the current ivory towers of data science.


This is at a moment when the industry generates more data than ever before! New developments in applied machine learning offer the opportunity to quickly explore data and identify complex patterns from vast data sets including patient health data, clinical trial feedback and research outcomes.

Solving AI pain points for the industry

Pharma businesses are already seeing ROI from initial projects. The UK Medicines Catapult 2019 State of the Discovery Nation report revealed that 90% of UK SMEs in the pharma industry required data science as part of their drug discovery operations, with half of these SMEs requiring AI and machine learning. But there are still issues associated with AI in the life sciences industry.

Capabilities for data discovery are not clear and curation and preparation are still limited, all significantly lengthening the average project timeframe. There are also transparency considerations. Is the selected machine learning model reproducible across other data sets and business problems? Is the prediction accuracy visible, and can output easily be understood without ongoing reference to specialist data scientists?


Humanised machine learning empowers the citizen data scientist

With talented data scientists in scarce supply, the skills gap is continuing to pose challenges to life sciences organisations. Existing data science departments do not have a wealth of data scientists, so their talents – and workloads – are reserved solely for the most business-critical and time-sensitive tasks, particularly in the R&D space.


New applied machine learning technologies enable these life sciences organisations to bring machine learning and other advanced technology within the remit of employees of all skill levels, helping these problem owners become ‘citizen data scientists’ in their own right.

They bring the ability to prepare, manipulate and visualise data, creating, managing and optimising deployable machine learning models within minutes into the hands of every employee, effectively coaching the user from data preparations right through to model deployment and management.


The bottlenecks of a limited data scientist talent pool are avoided and projects can be completed quickly – without having weeks or even months added to their timeframe while waiting to be resourced.


Far reaching applications: unlocking business value across the enterprise

Mind Foundry is already working with a top-ten pharma company applying ten possible machine learning applications to multiple day-to-day operations, with a view to further refining the transformative applications of AI and machine learning for the industry.

Beyond all the promises that have been made for AI in drug discovery, the real transformation in productivity in life science companies value chain will be wrought by augmenting the existing workforce with AI and moving beyond the realm of the specialist data scientist.

Machine learning can be harnessed to find and enrol patients in the most suitable trials and facilitate the entire patient journey. Market access, sales and marketing teams can make better decisions faster, the productivity of other scarce resources such as MSLs can be transformed and patient-centric real world evidence can be made truly useful.

Transforming every step of the life sciences value chain


These solutions can be easily deployed to rapidly tackle specific business problems, empowering pharmaceutical companies and other players in the life sciences sector to unlock the full value of their data.