US Pharmaceutical Companies on an Interactive Map: Categorized by Ranking and the use of Artificial Intelligence(AI)
By: Yousuf Ali
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Pharmaceutical, Data Science, Drug Discovery, Data Visualization

Introduction:

Last week, I had an opportunity to attend the conference hosted by the American Association of Bangladeshi Pharmaceutical Scientists (AABPS) in Bethesda, Maryland. At the conference, I talked to people from the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA. During those conversations, I found that most of the people who work in the pharma companies located in the east coast of the country and surprisingly there are plenty of companies in the country I have never heard of. Reasonably, I asked myself, “Are most of the pharma companies located on the east coast or how are they located across all the states or why haven’t I heard about those companies name”?. A quick search for “us pharma companies” on google gave me a few links. Among them, these two ( drugs.com and rxlist.com) websites were helpful, and drugs.com contains more information so far. So, I started to save information about all of the companies, including their addresses from drugs.com using python.

Data:

Here is a snapshot of the code that I wrote but will not share all of the code here to keep the article short.

This code gave me the idea that there are 404 companies listed on the website. So, I started to collect addresses of the companies from the links. There are about 80 links that grayed out and what I found that they have been either acquired by or are part of big companies. So, that left me around 320 links. At first attempt, I saved 262 companies information that includes name, full address, website, and career page link. With another attempt, it gave me information (name and address) of only a few companies. Then, I added some data manually and created a total of 308 companies information with their physical addresses in the country.

First Map:

Now I took these 308 physical addresses and found their latitude and longitude using python library called ‘googlegeocoder.’ Then, I created my first map by using python ‘folium’ library. Now I wondered, how could one locate the top pharmaceutical companies on the map?

More Data:

Next, I searched on google for top pharmaceutical companies, and it turned out pharmexec.com is a good source of top 50 Pharma companies. Since they listed as images or with the respective company’s logo, I could not use my coding skill. But I still wanted to answer the question that was asked earlier. So, I had to manually collect the data while I was working to block my western blot membrane with non-fat milk in a lab. During my research on the information of pharma companies, I found that a significant number of companies use artificial intelligence (AI) for drug discovery which was reported on an article titled “33 Pharma Companies Using Artificial Intelligence in Drug Discovery”. That’s why I was curious to look at the map to find which companies have been using Artificial Intelligence.

Here are the data that look like the following:

Final Map:

With this data, I was able to create my final map. Click the link below to see it.

Pharma_MAP

or copy and paste the following link in your browser

https://bit.ly/2NWBT7u

You can zoom in and zoom out from top left button. Also you can drag and move the page with your cursor.

How the Color on Map Works?

If you click on the color icon, it will show the company’s name and some other information like following image.

if a company is listed as top 50 and uses AI, it will be colored as- red

top but not uses AI — blue

not top but use AI- purple

not top and not use AI — green.

Now, I can imagine what you are thinking. You want resources (code, data) and play with it!! All code and data are available on my github_page

Thanks for reading. Please, don’t hesitate to comment below the article.