The impact of AI on drug discovery

And we’re seeing something similar in drug discovery. In our industry, the productivity efficiencies we’re looking to unlock span a long process, from target identification all the way through to clinical trials.

Historically, the main bottleneck in this process was right at the beginning: identifying new, high-quality therapeutic targets used to involve painstaking fundamental research into the mechanisms of disease. This would yield an understanding of the key disease-causing players in the cell, players that could be influenced with a drug to treat the illness. Only when this research was published in an academic paper could pharma companies then race to find molecules that could hit that target.