Gartner’s Hype Cycle Predicts Growing Adoption for AI in Clinical Development

To bring products to market, life sciences companies must address the challenges of clinical development processes, including timelines that span a decade or more, dedicated resources, and investments of $2 billion or more. Furthermore, the people who could have benefitted from the new drug or treatment must wait longer to use it.    

Gartner​®2022 Hype Cycle™ for Life Science Clinical Development points out that CIOs are increasing investments in clinical development optimization to bring products to market more quickly. One area of interest is AI for clinical development, in which Gartner includes WhizAI as a Sample Vendor. 

While clinical development will always require time to ensure safety and efficacy, artificial intelligence (AI) can accelerate processes. For example, AI can replace manual processes used to evaluate patients for trials. AI can quickly search through data to find people who meet criteria for different trial phases. AI can also assist with protocol creation, determining the optimal age range for participants and pre-existing conditions that would exclude them while still enabling a large enough population to participate to produce a meaningful trial. 

AI can also help researchers use the petabytes of data that clinical development requires and generates to gain insights quickly into the trial and any adverse effects. With AI, it isn’t necessary to wait for someone to analyze data and create a report. Researchers can identify risks immediately, adapt, and increase overall trial quality. 

Additionally, scalable AI platforms can use data from the clinical development process to provide insights to all stakeholders. Instead of waiting 6 months or a year for information, the right AI platform can help decision makers gain the insights they need in a matter of weeks. 

AI's time-saving abilities can potentially reduce the clinical development cycle from 15 to 10 years or less and significantly reduce costs. 

Where Gartner Places AI in Clinical Development on the Hype Cycle 

Gartner considers AI in clinical development a high-benefit technology that’s about 2 to 5 years from mainstream adoption. However, Gartner also points out that market penetration is already at 5% to 20% – relatively high for an emerging technology. 

One of the reasons that penetration is high is that AI is also key to other technologies on the Hype Cycle, such as:

• AI-augmented safety vigilance
• Clinical data analytics platforms
• Clinical development hyper-automation
• Clinical trial data transparency
• Augmented analytics 

AI in clinical development combines multiple AI disciplines, such as machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), natural language query (NLQ), and natural language generation (NLG). WhizAI leverages these technologies to provide information to stakeholders throughout the clinical development process quickly and accurately, regardless of their data science expertise. The highly scalable platform works on the back end to identify patterns, spot anomalies, and provide insights. NLQ and NLP allow users to ask questions in natural language and receive clear, contextual responses. 

The Future of AI in Clinical Development 

Greater access to data is proven to bring products to the life sciences market more quickly. In fact, one of the reasons that COVID-19 treatments came to market so quickly was the access to large global data sets and mandates to share information. AI can provide a way to analyze data in weeks rather than months and make it more accessible in other scenarios. In the Hype Cycle report, Gartner summarizes, “AI has the capacity for driving high performance from automated processes involving large data throughput, aiding insight discovery over large datasets and applying machine intelligence to user interactions.”

Those features of AI in clinical development translate to real-world benefits of decreased time from data acquisition to insight, easy access to insights for all stakeholders, and time savings that bring medications to market faster without compromising safety and efficacy. 

To learn more about how early adopters of AI in clinical development are benefitting today, contact WhizAI. 

Hype Cycle for Life Science Clinical Development, 2022, Jeff Smith and Rohan Sinha, 26 July 2022.

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