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Tuesday, July 23, 2019

AI Drug Hunting for Pharma

Note the mention of simulations as a means of determining the effectiveness of prospective drugs.

AI Drug Hunters Could Give Big Pharma a Run for Its Money 
Bloomberg
By Robert Langreth
July 15, 2019

Using the latest neural-network algorithms, DeepMind, the artificial intelligence (AI) arm of Alphabet, beat seasoned biologists at 50 top labs from around the world in predicting the shapes of proteins. The company's win at the CASP13 meeting in Mexico in December has serious implications, as a tool able to accurately model protein structures could speed up the development of new drugs. Although DeepMind's simulation was unable to produce the atomic-level resolution necessary for drug discovery, its victory points to the potential for practical application of AI in one of the most expensive and failure-prone parts of the pharmaceutical business. AI could be used, for example, to scan millions of high-resolution cellular images to identify therapies researchers might otherwise have missed. In the short term, experts say AI-based simulations likely will be used to determine whether prospective drugs will be effective before proceeding to a full clinical trial. .... "

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