The German business newspaper Handelsblatt spoke with Dr. Roman Hipp, Senior Partner at Porsche Consulting, about the strategic impact of AI on drug discovery and the future allocation of roles in the pharmaceutical industry. AI will not abruptly revolutionize research and development (R&D) in pharmaceutical companies. Instead, it will gradually create new roles along the value chain and shift capacities – at a time when the industry has been under significant pressure for years.
An analysis by Porsche Consulting shows that R&D spending among the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies has grown by an average of 5.2 percent per year since 2021. At the same time, expiring patents and an increasingly complex regulatory environment challenge organizations, while external innovation is becoming more important. AI-driven biotech companies are accelerating this development by making early research phases more data intensive, AI-enabled, and often faster and more cost efficient.
In addition, a growing number of internal R&D processes will be automated, and AI is increasingly supporting decision-making during drug development. For example, this helps prevent companies from investing too long in drug candidates with low chances of success. Over time, this leads to a new distribution of tasks within research and development. In the long term, the share of value creation captured by AI biotechs – specially in early phases – is likely to continue to grow, without diminishing the strategic importance of internal R&D.
At the same time, global competition is intensifying the pressure to adapt: China is building a dynamic AI biopharma ecosystem, the United States are professionalizing AI-driven R&D through scalable platforms, and Europe – despite its strong scientific base – must address existing infrastructure gaps.
Read the full article in Handelsblatt (Paywall, German only, author: Helena Smolak).