May 8 (UPI) — The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday announced what it called an aggressive agency-wide artificial intelligence adoption timeline, as well as a new AI tool to help scientists spend less time on tedious, repetitive tasks that can slow the review process.
The FDA made the announcement in statement about “an aggressive timeline to scale use of artificial intelligence internally across all FDA centers by June 30, 2025, following the completion of a new generative AI pilot for scientific reviewers.”
The FDA said it plans full AI integration with FDA’s internal data platforms.
“I was blown away by the success of our first AI-assisted scientific review pilot. We need to value our scientists’ time and reduce the amount of non-productive busywork that has historically consumed much of the review process,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Martin A. Makary said in a statement. “The agency-wide deployment of these capabilities holds tremendous promise in accelerating the review time for new therapies.”
The FDA’s Jinzhong Liu said AI saves a lot of time with scientific review tasks.
“This is a game-changer technology that has enabled me to perform scientific review tasks in minutes that used to take three days,” Liu said in a statement.
All FDA centers are being directed to deploy AI immediately to achieve full integration by the end of June.
AI is a transformative technology, but issues have arisen with AI accuracy.
In March researchers reported finding that AI systems can seemingly “hallucinate” similar to the way some people do.
University of Washington researchers found AI systems pose hallucination risks that could have life-altering consequences, so AI work must be checked by humans to verify accuracy.
In May 2023, tech experts issued a startling warning that AI poses a risk of extinction for humans.
Hundreds of tech leaders signed onto a statement that said, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
The FDA said Thursday it plans to expand AI across all FDA centers, using what it described as “a secure, unified platform.”
The AI integration is being coordinated by FDA Chief AI Officer Jeremy Walsh and Sridhar Mantha, and the FDA promised that the AI rollout will maintain “strict information security and compliance with FDA policy.”
