Artificial Intelligence Articles

Science & Innovation

Harnessing the Power of AI to Detect ATTR-CM

Artificial intelligence (AI) has quietly become a part of our daily lives – through personalized recommendations, virtual assistants, or smart devices, we barely notice it anymore. Yet many of us might not realize the advances AI is making in healthcare. From accelerating drug discovery to improving disease detection, it is transforming the way we understand and manage health.AI has had numerous applications in cardiology in recent years, from analyzing results of cardiac imaging tests to...

Programs & Initiatives

The Future of Pharmacovigilance: Monitoring Medicine and Vaccine Safety Using AI and Other Tech

While many Pfizer colleagues worked to, develop and manufacture a vaccine for COVID-19, one Pfizer team was hard at work monitoring the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine trial. And they did so while also maintaining safety monitoring operations for more than 1,000 other products in the Pfizer portfolio.Pharmacovigilance is the name for the area of science which scientists and medical professionals monitor medicine and vaccine-related safety issues. “Medicine and vaccine safety is one of those...

An Immune System “GPS” Uncovers Pathways to Treat Diseases

When it comes to understanding the immune system, we’re in the age of a data “traffic jam.” Thanks to advances in gene sequencing technology and decades of research, we’ve amassed a huge trove of information, but utilizing it to drive new insights can be challenging. A collaboration with Israel-based startup CytoReason is allowing Pfizer scientists to harness computational technology that functions as a “GPS” for the immune system. The tools help to unpack these complex data sets so they can...

AI in Drug Safety: Building the Elusive ‘Loch Ness Monster’ of Reporting Tools

Whenever a patient takes a drug and has an unexpected side effect — from minor problems like a runny nose to more serious ones that require hospitalization — pharma companies are legally required to report this information, known as an adverse event (AE), to regulatory agencies. Within the pharmaceutical industry, AE reporting is a critical and time-consuming part of ensuring the safe and effective use of medicines by patients. Pharmacovigilance employees process a growing number of cases from...

Meet the New Digital Assistants Transforming Patient Medical Information

  Pfizer’s trio of recently launched digital assistants, Medibot in the US, Fabi in Brazil and Maibo in Japan, make it easier for patients and healthcare providers to access medical information. Meet Fabi, a digital assistant with an easy smile and brown curly hair who can make small talk in Portuguese and answer hundreds of questions related to Pfizer’s medicines in Brazil.   While chatbots have been around for consumer and retail use for more than two decades, Pfizer is leading the...

How Quantum Physics and AI is Disrupting Drug Discovery & Development

When a new molecule is a potential drug candidate, scientists want to learn as much about the molecule as possible; its shape, size and other properties down to the electron level. To do this they have traditionally used a technique called X-ray crystallography. In a multi-step, time-consuming process the compound is converted into crystal form and then an X-ray beam is shot through it to determine its 3-D structure.In recent years, scientists have begun using a computer modelling technique...

Artificial Intelligence: On a mission to Make Clinical Drug Development Faster and Smarter

Just as Industrial Revolution-era factory builders developed machines to mass-manufacture drugs once ground by hand, today’s pharmaceutical companies are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to both speed and smarten the work of clinical development. AI could assist pharma companies in getting medicines to market faster. AI today not only does flashy gene-sequencing work, it’s being trained to predict drug efficacy and side effects, and to manage the vast amounts of documents and data that...

A New Frontier for AI: Helping Scientists Develop Potential New Medicines

When Google’s artificial intelligence program known as AlphaGo decisively beat the reigning human champion of the ancient board game of Go in a series of high-profile matches in 2016, it was a watershed moment in the field of machine learning. And while much has been made of impressive feats of artificial intelligence (AI), like AlphaGo and self-driving cars, a lesser known fact is that the same techniques are also helping scientists explore potential new medicines. The link between AI and drug...