Date
18 November 2020
Devex: How AI can push for equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines
Writing for Devex, Access to Medicine Foundation Executive Director, Jayasree K. Iyer, and Researcher, Thomas Collin-Lefebvre, explore the issue of artificial intelligence and its potential role in facilitating access to medicines and vaccines in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
The advent of artificial intelligence as an adaptive and predictive technology offers the possibility for radical optimization of business practices, reshaping market opportunities for pharmaceutical companies and ultimately challenging the status quo on access to medicine worldwide.
However, pharmaceutical companies are only starting to explore AI fields of application. As reported by Microsoft, more than 50% of AI professionals work for the tech sector, while only 3% currently work for health organizations and 1% for nonprofit organizations. This disproportion certainly hampers the speed and extent of the technology’s adoption within the pharmaceutical sector.