There is a lot that has been published about the possible impact of AI on healthcare and the development of new therapeutics. In fact, one of the leading industries for early adoption of AI is healthcare FN^5. At this point, likely most, and probably the vast majority of biotech and pharma companies use at least some AI in some aspect of the regular activities at their company. But how many have an emphasis on AI for their technology development? We used our recently added, user-friendly, powerful search engine of AI-generated technology descriptions of the 10,000 bio/pharma companies in our BiopharmIQ database, to answer this question.
We found that AI is emphasized as an important aspect of technology development for about 9% (862 companies) of the 10,000 companies in our database (Table 1) FN^1. This number is not far off the ~8% medium and high intensity AI activity that has been recently reported for healthcare companies FN^5. For therapeutics-related companies, that percentage is a bit lower (e.g., 5.1%-7.5% See Table 1). Not surprisingly, for more biotech/pharma software-related companies the percentage that emphasize AI in their technologies is much higher (38.1%) (Table 1).
Table 1. Percent of Biopharma/Biotech Companies with an Emphasis on Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Identified Using the biopharmIQ Platform FN^1)
When we looked by company type, we were surprised that diagnostics companies appear to be embedding AI in their technology/development at a very high pace (~25%) compared to therapeutics companies or bio/pharma vendors (Table 2).
Table 2. Percent of Biopharma/Biotech Companies in the biopharmIQ Database by company type, with an Emphasis on Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Next, we looked at AI emphasis by size of the company (Table 3). It was interesting that companies with 1-10 employees on average have slightly less AI emphasis in their technologies according to our findings (6.3% vs. 9.7% to 10.6%). Maybe that’s because companies that have not emphasized AI have had a harder time raising money, and thus growing? Maybe it’s just because their technology descriptions are not as thorough? Or maybe that difference in percent AI by number of employees is not statistically meaningful?
Table 3. Distribution of Biopharma/Biotech Companies in the biopharmIQ Database with AI Emphasis by Employee Size
When we looked at the emphasis on AI by country (Table 4), surprisingly, Israel stands out with 17.3% of its biopharma/biotech companies in our database emphasizing AI for their technologies. In contrast, China had only 4.8% of its biopharma/biotech companies that our AI engine picked up as emphasizing AI, well below the global average (~9%). These results are surprising given that Israel ranks 15th of the top 34 countries in AI for companies overall (not just biotech/pharma) and 11th in the AI innovation index, while China ranks 2nd in both AI overall and in the AI innovation index according to Stanford’s AI Vibrancy tool (FN^4). Our results with respect to the AI emphasis of companies in our database may be skewed downward with respect to China in that our AI engine may have not worked as well on web sites that were translated from Chinese, or otherwise sponsored by Chinese companies.
Table 4. Distribution of Biopharma/Biotech Companies in the biopharmIQ Database with AI Emphasis by Country (Top 10 by total number of companies).
Finally, we looked at AI emphasis by state in the United States (Table 5). As expected, California and Massachusetts led in total number of bio/pharma companies that have an AI emphasis in technology development. However, when looking at the percent of bio/pharma companies that emphasize AI in technology development, our BiopharmIQ results are more surprising. Although not surprisingly California (11.0%) was near the top of the list in terms of states with the highest percentage of bio/pharma companies that emphasize AI, its similar percentage relative to Massachusetts (11.4%) is surprising when considering the much lower percent of AI in MA vs. CA corporations overall based on jobs data (Table 5) FN^3. Furthermore, surprisingly, Washington was the leading state in terms of AI in tech development in our biopharmIQ database, with 12.5% of its companies in our database emphasizing AI in their technology descriptions. This is in contrast to Washington’s relatively low rank when looking at AI adoption in any type of company using jobs data (Table 5) FN^3.
Table 5. Distribution of Biopharma/Biotech Companies with AI Emphasis by US State (Top 10).
In summary, our data of the implementation of AI in bio/pharma technology development using our biopharmIQ platform provides some interesting insights. We can see the adoption of AI working its way into bio/pharma technology development, now emphasized by about 9% of bio/pharma companies according to our data. It will be interesting to look at this data again near the end of next year, to see if the percent of companies using AI in their technologies continues to increase, as we expect.To perform this analysis, we used AI to update the technology descriptions in our database and created a free, easy Boolean search tool that you can use to search these descriptions to identify companies working on your favorite technologies.
Footnotes:
FN^1 AI is prominent enough in their public technology info that it was picked up by our AI engine in our 2 paragraph technology summary.
FN^2 Computational biology, software, digital medicine, bioinformatics
FN^3 Stanford AI Index 2023 Report
FN^5 “AI adoption in America: Who, what, and where”, McEllheran et al. 2024
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Article History:
11/26/24 MV/RF/DG
Not legal, investing, or tax advice.
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