Artificial intelligence will ‘revolutionize’ the pharmaceutical industry, says Nvidia

The news

Artificial intelligence will “revolutionize” the process by which drugs are discovered, chip giant Nvidia said this week, after unveiling a pilot project for Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk to use its new technology. AI-powered supercomputer.

“Computer-aided drug discovery, I think this will revolutionize the industry,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at a launch event for the computer, which researchers will use to train an AI model to design vaccines and analyze disease mutations, Bloomberg reported. .

Machine learning has made the pharmaceutical industry excited about its potential, for example by scan millions of possibilities to assess the effectiveness of deploying a drug to treat a disease other than that initially intended, replacing months of laboratory work.

A major breakthrough was that of Google DeepMind AlphaFold software, which predicts the structure and interactions of molecules – a previously complex, time-consuming process. Those were the inventors promised the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this month.

SIGNALS

The main benefits of AI for drug discovery are speed and cost savings

The main benefits that AI brings to drug discovery are speed and cost-effectiveness. Without the technology, developing a new drug typically costs more than $1 billion, and it costs more than $1 billion a decade to reach the marketaccording to a 2020 study published in the journal JAMA. AI has the potential to significantly shorten that timeline, using machine learning models that sift through millions of pieces of data, predict how certain compounds might affect the body, and discard unsuccessful compounds at the computational stage – currently a laborious process that requires people runs in computer. labs, according to the MIT Technology Review. “Many of the steps we previously did by hand are already being performed,” a researcher told the outlet.

The impact of AI-assisted drug discovery is still unclear

A key test for pharmaceutical companies relying on AI will be whether the drugs developed in this way are as effective for patients, Bloomberg noted. While some human trials for AI-enabled medicines are in progressthe true impact of the technology on the pharmaceutical industry will only be assessed when more data is available. “Sometimes when you open the door, you find out there’s actually nothing behind it,” a physicist and founder of a biotech machine learning company told the outlet, adding that AI “no magic bullet that can solve everything.”

The use of AI in the pharmaceutical sector is fraught with ethical concerns

The use of AI in drug development is still in its early stages, and it is ethical factors to be taken into accountnoted Stanford Medicine’s Scope blog – the well-documented algorithmic technology prejudice related to gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation, for example the unknown consequences of using AI without human intervention, and the difficulty reproduce clinical trial results when AI models are misused, which can render them virtually useless. Privacy is also a major concern because AI systems rely on large amounts of data that can be misused, and healthcare data is particularly sensitive. Considerations around how to reduce bias in algorithms and how to protect privacy should be at the heart of the technology’s development, argued a study in the journal Pharmaceuticals.