AI Twins Are Growing in the Pharma Industry

One of the most discussed use cases in pharma and biotech for AI is the creation of digital twins. By using massive amounts and data, the technology can create a digital recreation of a real person, which can then be used for various research purposes.

Pharmaceutical Executive spoke with Hamish Brocklebank, founder of Brox.AI, about some of the ways that digital twins are being used within the industry, and where the technology could potentially head in the coming years.

According to him, these twins have a variety of uses. One of the more commonly discussed use cases is for pure research. In this instance, a researcher creates a digital twin and then uses AI to simulate the effect of various molecules and conditions. However, Brocklebank explains that there are other use cases which may provide just as much, if not more, value.

Pharmaceutical Executive: How quickly are AI digital twins growing in the pharma industry?
Hamish Brocklebank: The short answer is that everyone is trying to use AI to speed up research and development cycles and accelerate broader business operations. What is interesting — and I will try not to turn this into too much of a pitch — is that there are multiple different approaches to this, and the term “digital twin” means very different things depending on who is using it.

We have actually retired the term digital twin in favor of “digital clones,” because the underlying approaches vary significantly. They fall into roughly three categories. The first is traditional research, which does not really involve digital twins at all. The second is what most people in the industry mean when they say digital twin — essentially pure synthetic data, where you are asking an AI to simulate how a doctor or patient might behave. In a simplified sense, you are telling the model to pretend to be a specific type of person and asking how they would respond. That is the approach most of our competitors take, and there are multiple variations of it. The third category — and our approach — is building one-to-one clones of actual individuals, because we are prioritizing high accuracy over convenience.

That said, the entire space is growing very rapidly, because the pace of business is accelerating across every sector. The need to make more informed decisions faster is real, and traditional research simply cannot keep up with that velocity.