A new AI sandbox will be launched to test how AI can help make medicines safer for patients.
The programme will explore how AI can improve the assessment of accuracy and safety, better predict risks, and detect effects that existing approaches may not capture.
Currently, adverse reactions to drugs send around 250,000 people to hospital in the UK every year, costing the NHS over £2 billion annually and around 90 per cent of drugs fail during development. This is partly because existing methods cannot always predict how medicines will behave in people.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) will establish a new regulatory “sandbox”, which will give companies and researchers a controlled testing environment to work with regulators to explore how AI tools could be used to better understand medicines safety and predict potential side effects.
The sandbox will allow innovators to test AI tools that have the potential to predict how medicines behave in the body, including how they are absorbed, processed and whether they may cause harm.
Backed by from the UK Government’s Regulatory Innovation Office, the programme will explore how better use of clinical data can improve understanding of how medicines work across different groups, including those often underrepresented in studies such as children, older people and people from diverse backgrounds.
Up to five AI-driven approaches will be tested in the first phase.
Health Innovation Minister Preet Gill said: “The AI revolution is here, and we want our NHS staff to be the first in the queue, armed with rigorously tested clinical AI tools.
“By giving innovators a safe space to test these tools alongside regulators, we can build the evidence base needed to get safer, more effective treatments to patients faster. That means fewer adverse reactions, less reliance on animal testing, and a smarter, more efficient medicines development process.
“Through our 10 Year Health Plan, we are driving the NHS to be the most AI-enabled healthcare system in the world.”
Science Minister Lord Vallance said: “Too many promising medicines fail late in development or never reach patients because the evidence needed to support them is difficult and slow to generate.
“By leveraging our strengths in life sciences, AI and pro-innovation regulation, this sandbox will help make the UK one of the best places in the world to develop the next generation of medicines safely.”
