If you own dividend paying companies, you will eventually look at some of the Big pharmaceutical giants because although it takes millions to develop a drug, if a drug is successful and can be prescribed by doctors to millions of patients the cost of the drug falls to pennies while the cost for the patients and the insurance companies keeps going up. The big pharma companies have convinced all of us, they need the 20 year protection in order to keep producing life saving drugs. As an investor you like the 20 year protection and one of your analysis of the companies is what is in the pipeline?

Ben Hirschler of Reuters reported the leading drug companies are embracing Artificial Intelligence to improve on the hit-and-miss business of finding new medicines. The aim is to use supercomputers and machine learning systems to predict how molecules will behave and how likely they are to make a useful (profitable) drug thus saving time and money on unnecessary tests. The goal is reduce the time from an average of 5 years to one year. Understanding the human body is complicated and what happens in the computer will not be the same as what happens in the body, it is worth doing the experiments. In the near future you should see more start ups of AI companies.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, when you read these types of reports as an investor you will be glad the company is investing in everything that needs to be done because most research is not finalized because of complications along the way – the tests go through multiple Phases and it is important to understand the Phase cycles of Big Pharma when you invest. If AI works as well as it is hoped and the average drug can be done in 2 years, then Insurance companies will push for cutting the 20 year protection length. With everything in life there is good and maybe changes in the future

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions