Seoul Forum To Ask Whether AI Can Cut A Decade Off Drug Development Amid Healthcare Revolution

SEOUL, South Korea — A major forum hosted by South Korea’s Maeil Business Newspaper is set to bring together global executives from Microsoft, Cleveland Avenue and other organizations this week to examine whether artificial intelligence can meaningfully compress the years-long, multibillion-dollar process of developing new drugs, alongside broader sessions spanning art, architecture, entertainment and the global wine industry.

The forum’s central healthcare session, titled “What Is Real, and Who Bears the Responsibility?”, is scheduled for the afternoon of Sept. 8 and will focus specifically on the current state of medical AI. Organizers say the session will address a growing tension within the field: AI systems are already being used to interpret medical images and draft clinical records, yet clear lines of responsibility for the results those systems produce remain unresolved.

David Ryu, global chief medical officer at Microsoft, and MJ Chey, co-founder and chief executive of Integral Health, are scheduled to give presentations during the session, with Mingu Lee, managing partner at venture firm Cleveland Avenue, moderating the subsequent discussion. According to the forum’s organizers, the panel intends to explore how audiences and industry professionals can distinguish between convincing AI demonstrations and genuine, validated medical evidence, along with directly examining the question of whether artificial intelligence can realistically shave a full decade off the traditional drug development timeline.

That question sits at the center of a broader industry conversation that has gained significant momentum over the past year. Speaking at the 44th Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco earlier this year, industry analysts described the pharmaceutical sector as increasingly focused on artificial intelligence’s potential to address what many now consider the “last untouched bottleneck” in the drug development pipeline: clinical trials. While AI’s early healthcare applications drew significant attention for their ability to predict protein structures and identify novel drug candidates, industry observers say the more recent momentum has shifted toward using the technology to streamline the lengthy, expensive process of testing those candidates in human trials.

Industry analysts have described this dynamic as a race between two competing exponential trends. While computing power has followed a decades-long trajectory of exponentially increasing capability and falling costs, often referred to as Moore’s Law, drug development costs have moved in the opposite direction, with the inflation-adjusted cost of bringing a new drug to market now roughly doubling every nine years, a pattern sometimes called Eroom’s Law, Moore’s Law spelled backward. Proponents of AI-driven drug development argue the industry must find ways to convert labor-intensive clinical processes into more automated, computing-driven workflows in order to reverse that troubling cost trajectory.

Oncology has emerged as the area where this shift appears furthest along, reportedly accounting for roughly one in three pharmaceutical AI partnerships currently in place among leading drug companies, reflecting both the volume of available cancer-related data and the underlying biological complexity of the disease, which analysts say makes it especially well suited to AI-assisted research approaches.

Beyond Wednesday’s healthcare-focused session, this week’s forum has organized a broader slate of discussions spanning the intersection of artificial intelligence with several other major industries. A session titled “AI That Creates: The Future of Art and Creativity” will bring together Noam Segal, a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; Moontae Lee, who heads the Superintelligence Lab at LG AI Research; and Seol Park, a senior brand specialist at LG. On the afternoon of Sept. 9, Bernardo Fort-Brescia, co-founder of architecture firm Arquitectonica, is scheduled to speak during a session examining how artificial intelligence is reshaping architectural design.

The forum will also address the entertainment and media industries, with a session at Jangchung Arena bringing together two prominent figures from global popular culture. C.B. Cebulski, editor-in-chief of Marvel’s Asia Originals division, and Jeffrey Godsick, a vice president at Sony Pictures Entertainment, will discuss strategies for expanding global intellectual property franchises and examine South Korea’s position within that broader landscape, given the country’s well-established strength in storytelling and content production.

A separate session focused on the luxury goods and beverage sectors will examine the global premium wine industry. Salvatore Ferragamo, representing the Il Borro wine estate, and Shinji Hori, chief executive of wine retailer Enoteca, are scheduled to discuss how the industry is navigating three converging pressures: climate change, the preservation of winemaking heritage, and the rise of emerging markets across Asia, including South Korea. The discussion is expected to address how sustainability considerations are influencing both wine quality and pricing, along with the specific conditions needed to support continued growth within the Korean wine market.

The healthcare-focused portion of the forum arrives amid a period of substantial global investment activity tied to artificial intelligence in medicine and drug development. Major pharmaceutical companies have continued announcing large-scale AI infrastructure investments and partnerships with technology firms including Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Nvidia, while venture capital funding for AI-focused health technology companies has shown signs of stabilizing after an earlier boom-and-correction cycle, with investors reportedly becoming more selective and increasingly focused on companies that can demonstrate clinically validated results rather than early-stage promise alone.

Industry surveys have also pointed to accelerating internal adoption of generative AI tools within pharmaceutical and life sciences organizations, with recent industry outlook reports highlighting both digital transformation and generative AI as significant emerging trends shaping research and day-to-day operations across the sector. Analysts tracking the space have noted that organizations seeing the clearest productivity gains tend to be those that integrate AI tools into clearly defined workflows, paired with strong governance around data sourcing, validation and auditability, particularly as more autonomous, agent-like AI systems begin appearing across research and development functions.

With this week’s Seoul forum bringing together voices from Microsoft, LG, the Guggenheim Museum, Marvel and Sony Pictures, among others, organizers have positioned the event as a broad-based examination of how artificial intelligence is simultaneously reshaping fields as varied as medicine, architecture, entertainment and luxury goods. The healthcare session specifically is expected to offer one of the more closely watched discussions of the forum, given the scale of investment and public interest currently surrounding the question of whether AI can meaningfully accelerate the notoriously slow and expensive process of bringing new medical treatments to patients.