Johnson & Johnson: Transforming Medicine with NLP

Known most widely for its dominance in medicine technology, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) is also pioneering advancements in data science.

Natural language processing (NLP) is one of these areas, with the healthcare behemoth working to tackle the issue of unstructured data.

With most of the world’s healthcare data unstructured, including clinical notes and reports that hold vital information, NLP is helping J&J’s scientists to extract and analyse this data efficiently, fuelling innovation and accelerating the discovery of new drugs.

Transforming vast, complex data

By harnessing NLP, J&J improves its and the wider healthcare world’s, understanding of disease progression, optimising clinical trials and enhancing patient communication.

Around 80% of all data generated is unstructured, according to Forbes.

From video and audio files to surveys and data from wearable devices, this data exists outside neatly-organised databases. 

To tackle this, especially in an industry marred by unstructured data like patient notes, medical images like x-rays and pathology reports, J&J’s intense focus on NLP allows scientific teams to extract and transform traditionally inaccessible information into actionable insights.

This capability is critical because it fuels the company's innovation pipeline by enabling researchers to identify high-value problems to address within medicine and healthcare.

How deep learning is revolutionising healthcare at J&J

Over the past decade, deep learning methods have dramatically enhanced NLP’s ability to analyse text-based medical documents with precision.

J&J’s data analytics platform integrates diverse datasets to create data liquidity and speed up insight generation.

This platform empowers researchers to harness predictive analytics and richly aggregated information to develop impactful solutions for critical patient challenges worldwide. 

For example, J&J’s work with electronic health records (EHRs), which often contain valuable unstructured data, clearly lays out the role NLP plays in accelerating clinical and drug development programmes, by making data from clinical notes and reports usable.

“In the next few years AI is going to play an even bigger role," says Jim Swanson, J&J’s Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer.

"The technology is currently being used to help our employees detect disease at earlier stages, accelerate drug discovery, assist with clinical trial recruitment, map a patient’s anatomy before a procedure and help surgeons predict the best tool for surgery.”

AI and NLP integration for drug discovery

J&J combines NLP with broader AI tools to advance drug discovery.

By applying AI to de-identified medical datasets, including EHRs, lab results and genetic data, the company pinpoints biological variations that drive diseases.

NLP’s strength here is in processing textual medical data.

And with this complemented by AI’s molecular design capabilities, it helps researchers discover and optimise drug candidates faster. 

“Drug discovery is an extremely challenging process with only a small percentage of lead compounds moving into clinical trials and an even smaller percentage becoming approved medicines,” adds Chris Moy, Scientific Director of Oncology, Data Science & Digital Health and R&D at J&J Innovative Medicine.

“By applying AI, we can advance the most promising drug candidates into clinical development, with the goal of improving the probability of successfully bringing a drug to market and rapidly getting new treatments to the patients who need them the most.”

Where will NLP take J&J next?

J&J aims to further embed NLP and AI into its mission to reimagine medicine discovery and patient care.

By continually advancing NLP technologies and data science collaborations, the company seeks to bring transformative treatments to patients faster, optimise healthcare delivery and improve clinical outcomes worldwide. 

“It’s our responsibility to make sure patients and customers have reliable access to the transformational therapies our company creates,” says Vishal Varma, Director of Supply Chain Digital & Data Science and Operations Research at JJ&J Services.

 “AI is helping us build a stable, efficient and resilient supply chain so we can deliver on that obligation.”

The company’s investment in and delivery of solutions powered by NLP is central to its strategy to revolutionise medicine and health.

By converting vast unstructured data into meaningful insights, accelerating clinical trials and advancing drug discovery through AI, J&J is pioneering a future where data and technology profoundly improve patient lives globally.