Making New Drugs With a Dose of Artificial Intelligence | NYT

Research different

"The contest, the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction, was not won by academics. It was won by DeepMind, the artificial intelligence lab owned by Google’s parent company.

“I was surprised and deflated,” said Dr. AlQuraishi, a researcher at Harvard Medical School. “They were way out in front of everyone else.”

DeepMind specializes in “deep learning,” a type of artificial intelligence that is rapidly changing drug discovery science. A growing number of companies are applying similar methods to other parts of the long, enormously complex process that produces new medicines. These A.I. techniques can speed up many aspects of drug discovery and, in some cases, perform tasks typically handled by scientists.

“It is not that machines are going to replace chemists,” said Derek Lowe, a longtime drug discovery researcher and the author of In the Pipeline, a widely read blog dedicated to drug discovery. “It’s that the chemists who use machines will replace those that don’t.”"

Making New Drugs With a Dose of Artificial Intelligence | NYT