Rome, April 7 (beraking latest news Salute) – New collaboration for UCB and Microsoft, which ushers in a multi-year strategy to combine Microsoft’s computational services, ‘cloud’ and artificial intelligence with UCB’s drug discovery and development capabilities. “Microsoft will provide artificial intelligence technology and applied scientists to work alongside our scientists and professionals, with the aim of fostering the discovery of new correlations and models, essential for developing new and highly personalized drugs – underlines Ucb – Some activities related to drug discovery require the analysis of large data sets or unstructured multimodal information, which Microsoft’s platform can support, thus enabling our scientists to discover new drugs in a more efficient and innovative way. “
The collaboration arises from the work already undertaken with Microsoft in relation to Covid-19. As part of the ‘Covid Moonshot’ project, our molecules and computational chemists have contributed to the design of compounds with the aim of developing a bioavailable oral anti-viral for Covid-19.
“In line with this global perspective, in Italy too we have long embraced the project of digitization and the challenge of artificial intelligence. To offer the people who work in Ucb more and more opportunities for professional updating and high-level training on the issues of technological innovation and digitalization, we have activated a training and operational path of digital rethinking of all company departments, aimed at exploiting the potential of artificial intelligence to make truly ‘data driven’ decisions – continues the note – Digital transformation is a precious opportunity for every Ucb employee since, regardless of function and ‘seniority’, in this context, everyone will have the possibility of a radical ‘reskilling’, to update themselves according to the latest trends in the sector and to interact with consultants and stimulating partners “.
This development plan “uses prestigious partnerships, such as, for example, the one with Talent Garden: the data digital academy, launched in 2020, represents a structured literacy plan aimed at all Ucb collaborators in the field of digitalization and data management, followed by a deeper start-up work on the digital transformation of processes already underway, with the aim of significantly influencing the development of all our future projects – recalls Ucb – For project development, we have available to the network of startups that Tat is able to mobilize, but also the contribution of the students of two masters (Digital Transformation and Business Data Analysis) of Talent Garden, to whom we have offered the opportunity to confront the challenges that our company is meeting and proposing truly innovative solutions “.
“Digitization – comments Federica Dal Toso, HR director of Ucb Pharma – is one of the fundamental levers for business development and is therefore at the heart of the group’s strategy. With this project we want to offer the opportunity to the people who work in Ucb to enrich their cultural background and integrate their experience with new and increasingly useful skills, which today represent the future of any company. Digital skills and the ability to work with data are only a part, however important, of the tools we think are fundamental to address the context in which we operate: we are investing equally in acquisition and development paths of an agile, transversal and data-driven way of thinking, on emotional intelligence as an indispensable key to access a hyper-complex world and on new leadership models “.
“For us, investing in innovation does not in any way mean neglecting the human dimension of work, but rather combining digital investments with those in welfare and training. Our policy is, in this sense, in contrast to the current situation, which sees a downsizing of the workforce almost everywhere – observes Ucb – In the last two years, several new professionals have been hired and numerous new hires are expected for the next few months. In 2020 we continued to hire, despite the pandemic, increasing by 18 , 2% of our staff; 62% of new hires are women, confirming, among other things, a great gender balance and an exclusive focus on skills. And the trend has not stopped, but rather continues : in the first three months of 2021, the number of UCB collaborators increased by a further 10%, of which 43.75% are women. within the organization in the last year, along national and international development paths, is approximately equal to that of people hired from outside, demonstrating the virtuous balance between investment in internal resources and the search for skills ‘external”.