Johnson & Johnson accelerates drug development with artificial intelligence

American pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson is increasingly relying on artificial intelligence to significantly reduce the time required to research and develop new treatments, at a time when the pharmaceutical industry is looking for solutions to shorten extremely expensive and time-consuming processes. According to the company's IT director, Jim Swanson, quoted by Reuters, AI has already managed to halve the time required to identify promising leads for the development of new drugs.

• Pharmaceutical research, accelerated by algorithms

Although artificial intelligence cannot yet discover and launch new drugs completely autonomously, the technology allows the company to quickly analyze huge volumes of chemical and biological compounds to select variants with the greatest therapeutic potential. "There is still a long way to go, but we can optimize," Swanson explained at the Reuters Momentum AI event in New York, emphasizing that the time to optimize research leads has been reduced by 50%.

The company is already using AI to accelerate the development of treatments in oncology and immunology, in an important strategic context, marked by the expiration of the patent for Stelara, one of the group's most profitable drugs, Reuters reports.

• From laboratories to factories and documentation

The impact of AI is not limited to research. Johnson & Johnson also uses the technology to: optimize production processes; improve the supply chain; develop smart medical devices; automate documentation for regulatory authorities. A spectacular example is the reduction in the time required to write reports for clinical trials: from 700-900 hours, the process has come to take about 15 minutes. This efficiency can speed up the approval of treatments and significantly reduce operational costs.

• AI and personalized medicine

In the medical device division, AI already contributes to: faster mapping of the heart in arrhythmia treatments; increased precision in orthopedic interventions, including knee and hip prostheses; more efficient selection of patients for various clinical trials. This can improve both medical performance and the representativeness of clinical research.

• Employees are not replaced, but adapted

Swanson argues that AI is not seen as a threat to the workforce, but as an extension of employee skills. At the company, about 4,000 IT specialists are expanding their roles by integrating new technologies. "A software engineer is not being replaced, his role is being expanded,” the official said.

Johnson & Johnson's strategy reflects the profound transformation that the global healthcare industry is undergoing. In an industry where launching a new drug can take more than a decade and cost billions of dollars, artificial intelligence is becoming an essential tool for competitiveness, efficiency and innovation. For companies like J&J, AI does not yet promise miracles, but it already offers something extremely valuable: greater speed, lower costs and an increased chance of bringing new treatments to patients faster.