Alphabet Holding, which is a subsidiary of Google, has just announced the establishme of a company that is going to develop artificial ielligence-based medicines. Some time ago, DeepMind, another subsidiary of Alphabet, announced that it was able to predict the structure of proteins using artificial ielligence.
The new company, called Isomorphic Laboratories, will use artificial ielligence algorithms to create new drugs. Although the CEO of DeepMind also serves as the CEO of Isomorphic Laboratories, these two companies do their work independely, but in the meaime, they may sometimes collaborate.
Over the past years, experts have repeatedly poied to the benefits of artificial ielligence as a way to make it faster and cheaper to find new drugs for various diseases. Artificial ielligence can find the best combinations by scanning a huge amou of data about molecules. Over the past 2 years, companies active in the field of artificial ielligence have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in capital.
The CEO of Isomorphic Laboratories said that the company plans to develop models that can predict how drugs ieract with the body. Probably, this company will not launch a specific drug on the market, and the created models are supposed to be sold to pharmaceutical companies.
Of course, the developme and testing of drugs is not as easy as discovering the structure of a protein. Even when a drug has all the necessary properties chemically, it may not work well for the human or animal body. According to published reports, more than 90% of drugs that reach the clinical trial stage are not approved in the end.
Finally, at least in the near future, artificial ielligence is not going to face a huge change in drug research, but these tools can make the developme process of differe drugs faster than in the past.
Source: Engadget
