How natural language processing can make a difference in pharma

Everyone’s talking about AI these days and it can be easy to get lost in the whirlwind of terms, like machine learning, generative AI, large language models, and natural language processing. But all of these technologies and more are poised to make a big impact on the pharma world.

On today’s podcast, host Jonah Comstock welcomes Jane Reed, director of life sciences at IQVIA NLP, the new name for recent IQVIA acquisition Linguamatics. Reed talks through some of these different technologies and use cases and describes how natural language processing has exciting potential in translating real-world conversations on social media into pharmaceutical adverse event reports.

They also discuss precautions pharma companies need to take in this new world of LLMs – how to sidestep issues like bias and hallucination and when to use newer generative forms of AI vs traditional artificial intelligence. Finally, they look ahead to some of the upcoming trends in AI in pharma, particularly around drug discovery.

Tune in for an AI overview with a natural language processing focus.

You can listen to episode 116 of the pharmaphorum podcast in the player below, download the episode to your computer, or find it – and subscribe to the rest of the series - in iTunes, Spotify, acast, Stitcher, and Podbean.