Good morning from Geneva.
If generative AI is going to be more than hype and hallucinations, the trillion-dollar pharma industry is where the magic may happen. And no one is more ready to make it happen than Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson.
Last week, Hudson proudly announced his company’s new partnership with OpenAI and Formation Bio, a biotech. In the first-of-its-kind partnership, Sanofi will give OpenAI access to its databases, hoping that generative AI can be the key to quicker and more effective drug development.
"Large-language models give us this insane opportunity to suppress, summarize, and create," Hudson told me on the phone from Paris. "It can help us get to a level in R&D where you can design a [drug candidate’s] molecular structure or identify appropriate patients that a drug will benefit."
Is this then the generative AI application the world has been waiting for?
"It costs us 3-4 billion [dollars] to develop a drug, and 80% fail in phase 1 clinical trials," Hudson said. "I’d like to know in advance what will fail. [Our collaboration with OpenAI] is putting that money to work in other projects with a higher probability of success."
Neither is the promise of AI in health care years or decades away, Hudson believes.
The first results of Sanofi’s OpenAI collaboration should be in by the end of 2024 and will most likely take the form of AI-generated first drafts of FDA documents. The results of the more profound work on research and development and drug discovery should follow soon after. "I want to see early signs next year," he said.
Still, whether this new partnership will indeed one day unlock billions of dollars in savings or new blockbuster revenues remains to be seen. But Hudson did stress that it is this kind of tie-up between industry and AI innovators on cutting-edge and high-value projects is the real deal.
"We knew we needed to not just buy a license [for the internal use of OpenAI]," he said. There’s a certain vanity to such licensing deals, which essentially create a "powerful Google." "You can feel good about [OpenAI licensing]. You can write a press release." This partnership, however, "is less about that, and more about operationalizing LLMs."
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Peter Vanham
peter.vanham@fortune.com
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