RARE - Michal Konstacky

For this episode of RARE, I had the pleasure of speaking with Michal Konstacky to expand further on the topic of the increasing use of AI within healthcare. Michal is an expert in both early and late-stage clinical development, medical affairs, patient advocacy and pharmacovigilance. Skilled in medical and marketing content development, strategic planning, and execution, Michal has led on the development of various rare disease therapies and has been involved in the start up and growth of EU and global pharmaceutical, biotech and med-tech companies.

 

Michal’s Background

Michal is a clinician possessing extensive knowledge of the global pharmaceutical industry. Over the past 15 years, Michal has worked in Switzerland for leading companies such as Roche and AstraZeneca, while also providing consultancy services to small start-ups. In addition to his medical and business education, Michal has pursued studies in international business law and negotiation at Harvard, as well as AI in healthcare at MIT. His contributions to the field extend beyond clinical practice; Michal lectures, produces podcasts, authors books and articles, and provides mentorship to students from local universities.

 

AI in Pharma

Generative AI is taking the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry by storm. It is a fantastic new technology that also brings with it a few question marks with regards to ethics and future use. So far, the AI technology that is in development has been helping tremendously in the area in which he works at the moment – rare disease and pharmacovigilance. Although the use of AI can help automate some processes and reduce timelines which in itself brings with it a number of benefits, it does also potentially jeopardize some of the jobs within the pharma industry moving forward.

 

AI in Rare Disease

Working in the rare and ultra rare disease area, you have a handful of people across the world who are experts in a particular disease area. They might see one or two patients a year, perhaps up to ten so their focus is mainly on other diseases (regardless of being an expert in an ultra rare disease). 

AI can support in finding best practices from other therapeutic areas, they can facilitate development of patient advocacy programs for example. Sometimes some of the things that have been discovered in more prevalent diseases or even other rare diseases, are not well known to the small cohort of patients in ultra rare diseases so AI is very helpful in activities such as screening literature to find solutions and increase understanding of how to find treatments and the best way of moving forward. AI can also be used in the future to increase the speed of drug development for example, identifying new targets or new molecules.

There is a lot of new technologies coming into pharma.  Michal wrote an article recently called ‘A Stealth Revolution of Engineers’ exploring the idea that there are a lot of people with a technical education entering the pharma industry with some kind of disruptive thinking, exploring how we could change the way things have been approached traditionally. Ultimately, all aspects of medicine, pharma and even our daily lives will be impacted by AI.

 

Any areas safe from the impact of AI?

Michal was recently asked by a journal to write about the future of medicine and how it will look in 20 years from now. When he started to think about it, he realized everything will be impacted by these new technologies, the decision making at GP level up to robotic surgeries. The thing that will probably not be taken away is the human interactions and relationships. 

 

Thank you to Michal for taking the time to feature on RARE and share his views on the use of AI within the pharmaceutical industry.

The article mentioned by Michal in the interview can be accessed here: https://medium.com/@cardio.vaud/artificial-intelligence-in-medicine-the-stealthy-rise-of-engineers-e4fa7b5ed055

All views expressed in this episode are Michal’s own.