On Wednesday, April 24th local time, American pharmaceutical company Modena announced a partnership with artificial intelligence (AI) research company OpenAI. Modena hopes to achieve automation of almost all business processes by introducing AI technology.
The two companies did not disclose detailed transaction terms. As part of the transaction, approximately 3000 Modena employees will be granted access to ChatGPT Enterprise by the end of this week.
ChatGPT Enterprise is developed based on the most advanced language model of OpenAI and is currently a product that the company is focusing on promoting to enterprises.
Modner stated that further integrating AI into more processes will help the company plan to launch 15 new products in the next five years.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said of his collaboration with Modner, "Ultimately, AI will be able to accomplish more and more scientific work, but the best way to achieve this goal is to increase people's productivity and accelerate their work speed."
For many years, the use of AI in the pharmaceutical field has been hyped up, but there is little evidence to suggest that it will become a reality. Some pharmaceutical industry professionals doubt whether AI can better discover new drugs than humans.
OpenAI stated that its research and product teams will provide dedicated support to Modena, such as holding weekly strategic conference calls with the Modena team to discuss progress, coordinate goals, and plan future plans; Provide a shared Slack channel for quick problem-solving and other support.
Modena faces transformation challenges
Modena is exploring the application of messenger RNA technology (mRNA) in more fields, such as cancer treatment. After the outbreak of the COVID-19, Modena launched the COVID-19 vaccine based on mRNA technology and achieved great success. It also became a star pharmaceutical company from an unknown small company.
However, COVID-19 vaccine is also the only commercial product of Modena at present, which means that the company faces severe challenges in the post COVID-19 era and needs to launch more products.
According to the financial report released by Modena in February this year, the company's revenue in the fourth quarter of last year dropped sharply to 2.8 billion dollars from 5.1 billion dollars in the previous year, due to the obvious decrease in the number of people vaccinated with COVID-19 vaccine.
Modena's respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine is expected to receive approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the first half of this year. If the vaccine is approved, it will mean that Modena has finally set foot in the field other than COVID-19 commercially.
In addition, the cancer vaccine jointly developed by Modena and Merck has also received much attention. The two companies released mid-term trial data in December last year, stating that their collaborative therapy can significantly reduce the risk of melanoma recurrence.