The difficulty faced by the pharmaceutical sector is that new drugs are hard to develop because of the cost and time which it takes to bring a new drug to market. When you pair this with the high failure rate which comes with new drug discovery, you have an expensive and high risk business model which proves a never ending uphill struggle for the pharma sector.
The use of supercomputers to sift through thousands of pages of old clinical trial data and research journals is starting to show real benefits - not only because the time which a machine takes to read and digest this type of material is significantly shorter than a human, but because the machines can connect sections of data which a human may not see, or have forgotten, by the time the connecting material is seen. This ability to search large amounts of data and make such subtle connections is what researchers hope will soon cut the average initial discovery research timeframe from five years to one. Not only will this slash time and cost in drug discovery, but also has shown to be useful at highlighting potential new drugs which may have slipped through the cracks caused by the natural limitations of human brain capacity and memory.
Is this the future of pharma? We shall soon see.