Artificial Intelligence: will it change the way drugs are discovered?

The pharmaceutical industry is beginning to invest in artificial intelligence (AI), with many large pharmaceutical companies partnering with AI start-ups in 2017 in order to develop better diagnostics or biomarkers, to identify drug targets and to design new drugs. But when will the first AI-designed drugs reach the market and will AI permanently change the pharmaceutical industry and the way drugs are discovered

AI is being used in multiple ways by drug developers — to develop better diagnostics or biomarkers; to identify drug targets; and to design new drugs. One of the most widespread uses is for re-purposing drugs — finding new uses for existing drugs or late-stage drug candidates. “You don’t have to repeat all the phase I testing and all the toxicology testing when you take it into another phase II trial [for] a different indication, so you can accelerate the process of medicine development quite dramatically,” explains Jackie Hunter, chief executive officer of Benevolent AI, Europe’s largest AI start-up to date. The company, founded in 2013, is looking to repurpose compounds as well as develop its own clinical pipeline.

Although AI is helping to speed up drug discovery, it is not on the verge of replacing human intelligence in the process just yet. “We are still a long way from the machine doing it all,” says Darren Green, GSK’s director of computational drug design and selection. “We can benefit from computer modelling but we still need to conduct real experiments and there will still be an element of serendipity.” But this might not always be the case, according to Zhavoronkov. “I think in the very near future, human [intelligence] in many cases will become irrelevant — using deep learning we can go into gene therapy and we can go into other interventions that are currently not available to us as tools in healthcare.” If you want to combine regenerative medicine with pharmacology and gene therapy, the only way to do it is AI