2025 AIChE Annual Meeting

From Atoms and Bits to Tokens — Reinventing Biopharma Innovation for the 10× Era

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The biopharmaceutical industry stands at a hinge moment where the convergence of artificial intelligence and biotechnology is redefining what “feasible” means. By the end of the decade, the speed of scientific innovation will be unrecognizable compared to 2020 — not by incremental optimization, but through exponential acceleration enabled by intelligent systems. This plenary explores the implications of 10× innovation across the product lifecycle: from molecular design to process development, scale-up, technology transfer, and manufacturing.

Drawing from recent advances in AI co-scientists, virtual clone modeling, agentic digital twins, and data-centric process architectures, we will examine how emerging digital and computational paradigms eliminate traditional human bottlenecks in discovery and development. We will also explore how these technologies transform regulatory frameworks, manufacturing control strategies, and organizational agility — requiring a fundamental rethinking of how teams, decisions, and evidence are structured.

Ultimately, this session calls for biopharma leaders and engineers to reimagine innovation not as a linear sequence of experiments and documents, but as a dynamic, data-driven network of intelligent systems and human creativity. The choices made today will determine whether we realize the promise of a 10× biopharma enterprise by 2030.