From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

How can AI impact clinical trials?

From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

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How can AI impact clinical trials?

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(upbeat music) - [Interviewer] Do you see AI having an impact on the timeline to go from clinical trials to the broad population? - Mm-hm. It potentially does. In fact, at the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, one of the things that was launched under President Obama, under Rob Califf, who was the director of the FDA at the time, is what's called the precision FDA program and what the precision FDA is really doing is asking how can we use data to accelerate a drug? So, many phases, the process of drug discovery is you kind of go through this series of gates to prove that it's safe, but if it's already gone through a certain amount of those gates, but you're now testing it for a different type of disease, maybe you should just automatically pick up where you left off, you don't have to kind of go through the same gates, so using data especially at the genomic level allows you to start asking those questions, especially given the genetic diversity that we have out there. - And I imagine that, AI and finding these clusters of drugs that are similar may also drive down costs for patients. - Potentially, so, that is the goal. However, what we do have as a challenge is that, as we've found increased tailored drug treatments or other type things, we do have drug companies who are saying, look, we're going to charge that much more for these drugs. We're going to charge an incredible amount more, not only for the diagnostic testing, but for those drugs. And so we have to have a real conversation that has started and stopped, it's kind of gone in fits and starts, but we need to do a better job of talking about what is the overall cost structure of drugs. We also have another side that is talking about people who are taking certain drugs and realizing that there's, using data to say, hey, you know what, if I boost this drug cost, the market will be able to bear it 'cause there's no choice for them, and so, there's kind of this two-sided thing of people using data in ways that we may not like for drugs. - Your proposed code of ethics may also come in because, there's a legal side to it. There's of course the vendor side to it where they have to understand the implications on the market. - That's right, and then, similarly, you know, a reason that ethics is so critical in here, and this is why the field of medicine has been leading this charge in many ways, is the question of bioethics, because, we do have these incidents, like the Tuskegee experiments using syphilis on the black population. We have Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were taken from her, her family received no compensation, and those cell lines are the primary way we have figured out cures for so many diseases, and so the ethical questions around the use of data in medicine, are not only profound, but now bleed over from the traditional world of medicine, into computer science, data science, and all these other fields. (upbeat music)

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