In recent high-profile conference appearances, Amgen CEO Bob Bradway and R&D Executive Vice President Jay Bradner highlighted the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to transform drug discovery, while underscoring the importance of the policy ecosystem in advancing biopharma innovation.
These appearances included:
- Semafor's World Economy Summit
- The Stanford Drug Discovery Symposium
- The Milken Institute's Global Conference
A Focus on Innovation to Fight the World's Toughest Diseases
"The world will need more innovation, not less, especially to address the growing burden of chronic diseases," Bradway stated at the Stanford symposium. He noted Amgen's focus on serious chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease and obesity that account for a large, and growing, share of healthcare costs worldwide. While new and effective treatments targeting these diseases can reduce this burden, they have the potential, more importantly, to save lives.
Tech Tools Accelerating Amgen's Work Across Value Chain
In his remarks at the World Economy Summit and at Stanford, Bradway emphasized how AI and machine learning are helping Amgen to accelerate drug discovery, select clinical trial sites and participants more efficiently, and get our innovative medicines through regulatory review and into the hands of patients more quickly.
These tools "are proving very additive to our discovery research capabilities, enabling us to choose the right molecules more quickly and bypass the empirical trial and error process," Bradway explained. "Clinical development is a challenge, and machine learning and AI better enable us to choose what we think can be the winning molecules." He added that these new technologies can provide value in our commercial and manufacturing processes as well as in R&D.
Jay Bradner echoed this point at the Milken Conference, noting that Amgen uses AI to accelerate many aspects of drug development, from protein folding to clinical trial optimization. "At Amgen, we're arguably the world's leader in protein engineering and complex protein therapeutics," he said. "Now we can predict structure and optimize potency, solubility and selectivity before we ever make the molecule." He called this "drug discovery raised to the power of AI."
Understanding the Value of Innovation
"As I reflect on my 40 years in the industry," Bradway said at Stanford, "I've never been more optimistic about our ability to innovate and have impact, and yet I've never been more concerned about the ecosystem in which that innovation occurs."
Achieving the full potential of our innovation, he explained, requires support from academia, regulators, policy makers, entrepreneurs, private investors, and public funders.
"We need to work together to help our elected officials understand the value of innovation," Bradway told the biotech innovators at the Stanford symposium.
Dramatic Scientific Advances Propelling Amgen's Innovation
In his Stanford remarks, Bradner noted that Amgen's "R&D engine is thriving, the portfolio is advanced, and increasingly mature."
Bradner highlighted Amgen's pioneering work in modular therapeutic design, which takes inspiration from nature to create innovative treatments such as bispecific T-cell engagers and RNA-directed therapies. "We hope to understand biological complexity and develop modular therapeutics for unprecedented impact for patients with serious diseases," he said, showcasing how these novel approaches have the potential to reshape what's possible in medicine.
At the Milken Conference, Bradner described how Amgen is leveraging its vast human datasets to glean genetic insights for use in developing precision medicines that target serious diseases. "If precision medicine is finding the right medicine and getting it into the right patient at the right time," he said, "never before has there been a better moment to practice this type of science."
