How Biotech Sector Can Capitalise on AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now ramified in every sector including biotechnology. The impact of AI is already visible in the biotech sector and there is a boom of startups using AI for various applications. However, there is a need to develop a holistic regulatory system to make the technology more responsible. Let's explore further.

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India has over 1900 AI startups including biotechnology (Zinnov-NASSCOM India Tech Start-up Landscape Report 2022). The pharma industry will be a major beneficiary of AI’s applications and might spend around $3 billion on AI in drug discovery by 2025.

In the biotech sector, AI has a big role to play in the analysis, learning, prediction and better decisionmaking of innovative solutions in areas of agriculture. It includes crop harvesting, monitoring crop and soil, gene editing, forecasting plausible yield), health (such as medical data analysis for finding novel drug targets, forecasting drug efficacy and toxicity, speed up the drug development process, creating personalised medicine, medication management, detecting abnormalities like cancerous tumours, to build new wearable devices that can detect and monitor certain disorders), to modify the genes and traits of animals and create mixed or cross-breed versions, to provide efficient production and better product quality, to identify the locations of genes, classification of protein along with protein’s catalytic role & biological function, analysis of gene expression and predictive modelling.