BiopharmaTrend.com

In this interview, Rasim Shah, Director at OKRA Technologies provided a glimpse into how the company applies state of the art machine learning technologies to solve real world challanges in the life sciences. Rasim also agreed to answer several questions about a more general context of AI in pharma, its current challanges and future perspective, as well as describe the current efforts the European Union puts into supporting the AI ecosystem in the region.

 

Rasim Shah, Director at OKRA Technologies:

OKRA Technologies is a leading European artificial intelligence (AI) company for life sciences. Our goal is to empower life science executives at their desks or whilst on the move, with explainable AI outputs. OKRA’s solutions deliver suggestions, predictions and explanations to enable life sciences executives and operational teams to drive the right drug to the right patient with humanised and understandable AI outputs. The OKRA engine learns from real-world data, structured, unstructured, clinical, commercial and scientific literature to drive the right insight to the different teams in life sciences. Our deep expertise in AI, combined with in-depth medical and product knowledge from life science leaders, has allowed us to develop and co-create products that can transform the way life sciences approach traditional industry challenges. We focus on operationalising AI in an ethical way by placing users of these systems at the centre.

Artificial intelligence (machine learning and deep learning, to be more specific) has become widely discussed topics in the area of life sciences and healthcare over the last several years and the excitement keeps growing. While a lot of pharmaceutical companies and healthcare organizations express considerable interest in possible new opportunities, associated with the use of artificial intelligence for early drug discovery, clinical trial optimization, and business intelligence, a considerable gap still exists when it comes to understanding new technologies by pharmaceutical professionals and leaders. The key questions here are these:

• What machine learning / AI can and can’t do for the pharmaceutical industry

• What should be done to harness practical and measurable value out of machine learning / AI?

• How it should be done and what are the timelines for getting returns on investments? 

Discover the AI methods & tools set to revolutionize healthcare, pharmaceuticals, medicine & diagnostics, as well as industrial applications and key insights. Hear from industry-leading experts on the latest technological advancements and business use cases for 2020! 

Variational AI is a newly formed artificial intelligence (AI)-driven molecule discovery & drug design startup out of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The company has developed Enki, an AI-powered small molecule discovery service. 

The founders of Variational AI are planning to build on top of their state-of-the-art expertise in machine learning, reflected in more than 40 research publications, including those presented at NIPS/NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, and other top events in the area of artificial intelligence research.

Artificial intelligence continues to expand into more aspects of human life on a weekly basis. The field is no longer confined to chess-playing robots or speech-recognition software; AI is now learning to drive, paint, and even discover and test new drugs.

In this new world, who owns these technologies? And who owns the work they create?