Vaccine Makers Promote Use of Artificial Intelligence for Development

WASHINGTON, December 15, 2021 – Artificial intelligence is helping accelerate the development of COVID-19 vaccines.

Leaders in Janssen’s and Moderna’s research and development groups said Tuesday that AI will help drug makers create better, more effective vaccines for patients.

Speaking at Bloomberg’s Technology Summit on Tuesday, Najat Khan, Janssen’s research and development global head of strategy, said AI is speeding up the delivery of new vaccines for populations in need. (Janssen is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson.)

“We use AI and machine learning to predict performance of clinical sites for potential [vaccine] trial sites,” Khan said. AI can help researchers target patients for trials to obtain more comprehensive data sets. Vaccine developers spend time, money, and resources finding patients to participate in clinical trials.

Khan said “only four percent” of eligible patients join a clinical trial. AI can help researchers focus their efforts to identify patients to participate, she said.

Outstanding concerns with AI

Despite AI’s usefulness in vaccine development, Khan said there is still a gap that exists between the information available in healthcare and what’s useful for AI. “There’s lots of data generated in health care, but it’s not connected,” Khan stated. “If it’s not connected, it’s fragmented.”

The problem, Khan said, is the varying systems health clinics use to input and store patients’ information. “Different systems across different clinics needs the same data,” Khan added. “I can go to two different clinics, each one year apart, and my data would be separate.”

On a large scale, mismatched datasets lead to “an over-index of patient information in some areas and an under-index in others,” she said.

For better innovation in treating and curing diseases, health providers need better ways to gather share data while complying with patient privacy concerns, Khan added.

One of health care providers’ challenges is effective data minimization and ensuring that health entities only use patient data according to the patient’s consent over the use of their data. The industry is starting to see progress with tokenization, Khan said, which anonymizes data and links with other data sources for a specific patient-focused purpose.

“This allows us to do even more with AI,” Khan said.