A few compounds picked by AI are now in development, but those bets will take years to play out. Reuters interviews with more than a dozen pharmaceutical company executives, drug regulators, public health experts and AI firms show, however, that the technology is playing a sizeable and growing role in human drug trials. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it had received about 300 applications that incorporate AI or machine learning in drug development from 2016 through 2022. Without AI, Bayer said it would have spent millions more, and taken up to nine months longer to recruit volunteers. Finding real-world patients by mining electronic patient data can be done manually, but using AI speeds up the process dramatically.

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Persons: Dado Ruvic, Jeffrey Morgan, Amgen, Badhri Srinivasan, Sameer Pujari, drugmaker Bayer, Bayer, Blythe Adamson, Roche, Richard Pazdur, Gen Li, John Concato, Natalie Grover, Martin Coulter, Julie Steenhuysen, Josephine Mason, David Clarke Organizations: Pharmaceutical Research, REUTERS, Pharmaceutical, Bayer, Novartis, Deloitte, U.S . Food, Drug Administration, Reuters, World Health, Flatiron Health, FDA, European Medicines Agency, FDA's Oncology, Excellence, Medical, FDA's Center, Drug, Research, Thomson Locations: U.S, Johannesburg, Texas, Finland, United States, London, Chicago