How Technology Accelerates Drug Development

How Technology Accelerates Drug Development
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Can you imagine if humans discovered all medicine required to treat every sickness? Many are optimistic that the current level of technology the world has today will allow humans to grant that wish soon.

As of now, it’s no secret that technology is accelerating the rate and pace of drug development. Of course, the devil is in the details, and you’re probably here to know how exactly technology can hasten the development of modern medicine. If that’s the case, stick around and find out.

Software And Digital Services’ Contribution To Research And Trials

While regular office and clerical software might have become the standard in managing research and clinical trials, research software and certain digital services targeted toward organizations performing drug development are now available.

Some of the benefits these services and applications may give you are the following:

  • They can help with the drug discovery process. Some of these apps and services can aid researchers in understanding patient issues and may provide helpful information that can hasten drug discovery and development. And if you have drug discovery trial software, the data you acquire might be processed faster.
  • They can assist in managing clinical trials. Running a clinical trial can be challenging. If you’ve run a clinical trial before, you’ve already learned that it’s critical to be on top of your game to ensure everything’s according to schedule and all the data you’re collecting are factual and timely. Fortunately, many clinical trial and quality management software can ease the process, so you can use that to your advantage.
  • They can aid in monitoring patients and diseases. Knowing every piece of new information about a disease and the patients affected can be nerve-wracking. With disease management and customer relationship management (CRM) software, monitoring everything, including the post-marketing process of the drug, can become less stressful.

Big Data Is Invaluable In Research

Drug development isn’t all about creating drugs. It involves a lot of research, which entails adequate data to fuel research.

Before a medicine is tested, pharmaceutical companies and researchers often start by checking peer-reviewed journals regarding the compounds and materials they plan to use in their drugs. Once they find the necessary information, they then collect data to verify the information they gathered. And one of the best sources of this information is big data.

Big data is just an amalgamation of vast swaths of information collected. It can contain almost anything—from informational articles online to public discussions on social media. Relevant information from big data can be mined and processed.

For example, you may consult big data to determine how a compound or ingredient mixed in your drug affects users. Doing so may allow you to find social media conversations discussing this topic, giving you the exact information you need without the mundane legwork.

Medical stethoscope on the blue printed circuit board. Repair diagnostic fixing electronic concept

AI And Machine Learning Will Push Medicine To Greater Heights

Big data, assistive software, and digital services are just the beginning of how technology can help drug development. The next step is through machine learning and artificial intelligence AI.

AIs are being used to help drug research in select laboratories and hospitals worldwide. With AI, researchers now have the power to start simulations that can produce tangible results.

For example, AIs have recently uncovered many protein structures and chemical compounds that can be potentially created—meaning, these compounds can be stable enough and potentially provide advantageous effects to humans.

Aside from simulations and discovering new compounds, AIs and machine learning can also process big data. With the increasing number of data collected from patients and hospital, thanks to wearables and other health-tracking devices and software, more medical information are available in big data.

Processing big data manually is almost humanly impossible. Suppose a single page of text can only amount to four kilobytes of data. Big data collected and generated in 2012 is more than three trillion gigabytes. If you convert that to kilobytes, that will roughly be the equivalent of 450 quadrillions of pages full of text. Plus, you should be aware that the size of big data doubles every year. Just imagine the sheer human resources and hours you need to process that and find the necessary information.

AI and machine learning can make processing big data trivial, which means that although you won’t get the exact quantifiable results, you’ll get the gist of what the data is trying to tell you. With them, they can easily filter the relevant data points to your research, which may be the key to discovering the potency of old medicines to combat new diseases—just like with the recent discovery of the potential of cough medicine to treat Parkinson’s.

Conclusion

You should know that technology doesn’t stop there. Many technological advances are pushing drug development to new heights. You have mobile medical devices, wearables, and so much more. Knowing how to harness these technological advancements can be helpful if you plan to develop or discover new medicines in the future.


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I am a pop culture and social media expert. Aside from writing about the latest news health, I also enjoy pop culture and Yoga. I have BA in American Cultural Studies and currently enrolled in a Mass-Media MA program. I like to spend my spring breaks volunteering overseas.

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