Generative AI: driving productivity and scientific breakthroughs in pharmaceutical R&D

The rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping pharmaceutical research and development (R&D), offering opportunities across drug discovery and development. Generative AI (GenAI) enhances productivity by enabling virtual assistants, which help automate routine tasks. It advances novel small-molecule drug design and drives new machine learning (ML) applications through synthetic data generation. Further impact is anticipated in drug development from improving operational efficiencies to novel digital innovations. Converging technologies enable rich data set capture, and next-generation AI will enable rapid, automated hypothesis generation and testing. Here, we assess the current and future applications, and the mid-term and long-term transformative potential, of GenAI in pharmaceutical R&D.