Alex Zhavoronkov, CEO of Insilico Medicine, a startup that generates potential drugs using Artificial Intelligence (AI) were recently given a challenge by one of the pharma companies partners. The team is set to identify the new molecules that are all set to bind with other associated protein with tissue scarring. They would be putting the molecule to test by synthesizing a new form of protein with many of experts in the lab to see if the AI was onto something or was it just creating hype. Why are businesses rushing towards AI-based medicine? It now costs around $2.6 billion according to one estimate to get a new drug to market and with new regulations, and testing face is important stage making the process much slower and expensive.
Their hope combined with the hype that AI could assist the chip that will figure out by reducing the time and labor before we start clinical trials. The idea is to bring more of deepfake using such techniques that would be able to decipher the complex rules by using the drug design and generate the modules from scratch. In December, Alphabet’s DeepMind debuted AlphaFold, by predicting protein folding which is important step when it comes to identifying potential diseases competition. Still, many of the experts in medical field are skeptical when it comes to deploying AI that can dream about the molecules that are effective and more practical for business.
The team along with collaborators at the University of Toronto added that they took 21 days to generate 30,000 design of molecules targeting a protein involved in fibrosis. The team went ahead and synthesized six of them while four to them showed potential during the initial tests. The team was able to find that AI-generated molecules were both potent against that targeted protein and displayed qualities that can be considered as drug-like.
