Join us for a lecture on ‘AI-Drug Hybrids: Innovation and Policy Aspects’ by our visiting professors Dr. Andreas Panagopoulos and Dr. Katerina Sideri, which will take place on Wednesday 3 December 2025, from 13:00 to 14:30 CET, both in person (room C4.09) and online via Teams. This presentation is part of our international seminar series on ‘Smart Pharma: Data, Innovation and Market Power’, which is in fact co-organised by both.
Dr. Andreas Panagopoulos is Professor at the Economics Department of the University of Crete, and the founder of TECHNIS an interdisciplinary platform that organizes online research seminars. His research deals with the forces that shape innovation, such as the role of patents as R&D incentives and currently the role of artificial intelligence in pharmaceutical innovation.
Dr. Katerina Sideri is assistant professor of political science at the Department of Political Science and History, Panteion University in Athens, Greece and also a founding member of TECHNIS. Her research focus is the governance of innovation with a focus on biomedical inventions and artificial intelligence.
Abstract - Patent applications indicate a trend towards completely integrating AI with drugs, a new frontier of medical technology that we term “AI-drug hybrids.” AI applications will be so tightly linked to drugs that the drugs could be effectively unusable without the AI. An example is potent yet toxic drugs that patients take only when a mobile app indicates to do so. Our concern is that “AI-drug hybrids” have a competitive advantage over future generic hybrids introduced upon patent expiration. One reason is that patent offices do not require patents to disclose the training dataset. Yet, even full disclosure may be insufficient in fostering competition. This is due to the data-aggregating capacity of these hybrids, which continuously collect data to retrain/improve the AI. Since this data is a trade secret, generics will be inferior because they will not be trained on this additional data.