Healthy Futurism

  Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash Machine Learning is making sweeping improvements to many industries, healthcare being one of them.  The impact ML can have on a sector or industry is as unique as the industry itself. Pharmacology is able to refine products by miniscule amounts to ensure quality and safety. The layer of coating that covers pill tablets is being reevaluated for accuracy by ML's capacity to find novel patterns in vast amounts of data. Resource management in hospitals is able to track inventory in real-time, giving physicians updates on what supplies are available. This is also helping in streamline the patient intake process. Radiologists are using AI to help identify chronic pulmonary hypertension faster using ML to find new pattern indicators. Personalized medicine, or precision medicine, is using ML to create treatment plans specific to a patient with increasing accuracy using predictive analysis.  So where does this leave business manager...

Lets look at the Pharmaceutical Industry for a minute...  Its a complex and competitive world out there for a multitude of reasons: There are time limits on patented treatments, customers have more bargaining power, and we are moving on to tackle more complex diseases. The more complex the disease, the more complex the research and development (R&D) phase for treatments. The R&D pipeline for treatments of rare, chronic, degenerative diseases is lengthy and costly, with many false starts and do-overs involved. How does it work? A simplified version is that researchers test the interaction of different molecules to gauge is a combination would be effective in killing the molecules of the disease in question. The process is traditionally done by human researchers using vast amounts of data about the properties of molecules to see the interaction between multiple molecules, and then their interaction with the disease.  As you can guess, its an extremely time consuming and ...