HONG KONG – The Korean 2020 KoNECT-MOHW-MFDS International Conference, which is taking place online this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, faced a challenging start. Technical difficulties hampered some of the early proceeding. However, technology took focus again later in the day in a more positive, with an exploration of artificial intelligence (AI).
New and updated preclinical and clinical data presented by biopharma firms at the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2020, including: Akcea, Amarin, Amgen, Arrowhead, Astrazeneca, Boehringer, Innovent, Lilly, Myokardia, Novartis.
While the COVID-19 pandemic has brought disruptions to R&D, market activities in the biopharmaceutical sector have remained active during the first half of this year in China. Venture capital investments, IPOs and partnering activity showed upward trends, except for M&A activity, which has declined for two years.
While the retail, security and entertainment sectors dove in early with the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, the life sciences sector has “been a bit of a laggard, frankly,” said Pratap Khedkar, a principal at the Evanston, Ill.-based consultant firm ZS Associates.
Columbia University professor and robotics engineer Hod Lipson knows the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) on a global level. “It permeates everything we do, from the stock market, from predicting the weather to what product you’re going to buy,” he said Wednesday during the second day of the virtual Ai4 2020 conference. “It’s even grading essays. You name it.”
With no new cases reported for more than 100 days, Taiwan appears to have successfully contained the spread of COVID-19 and has drawn attention to its medical achievements. Experts said at BIO Asia-Taiwan conference this week that with continuous government and investor support, the East Asian nation could move further up to join other leading biotech players.
In the shadow of COVID-19, experts at the BIO Asia-Taiwan conference on Wednesday warned of present and future challenges for the biotech industry. Changes in manufacturing logistics and financial distress will continue to cause concern for the industry.
Emerging companies continue to have a bigger role in pushing biotech innovation, and their presence is more important than ever, given the race for a COVID-19 solution. Those companies’ role in global R&D and new drug approvals was stressed by experts at the current BIO Asia-Taiwan conference.
Forty years after HIV became a global pandemic, there are now more than 30 drugs approved to treat it. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ director, Anthony Fauci, and clinical director, Clifford Lane, opined in the July 2, 2020, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine that “considering the spectacular scientific advances that have been made over nearly four decades, it is conceivable that with optimal implementation of available prevention strategies and treatments, the end of HIV/AIDS as a global pandemic will be attainable.”
Two separate groups have recently shown that in mouse models, inactivation of a single gene was enough to directly convert other cell types in the brain into neurons.
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