The Reality Of Ai In Drug Discovery. Highlights From The Society For Medicines Research Online Meeting

The Society for Medicines Research held a meeting reviewing recent practical progress in the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in drug discovery. This is an area receiving very significant interest in both large pharmaceutical and biotech sectors, and academia, for the potential to impact and increase efficiency of drug discovery, with many partnerships announced between large pharma companies and AI startups. This partnering interest and potential commercial value have led to intensive interest from investors. Recent highlights (as of March 2021) of investor commitment include a USD 100M fundraising by the U.K. AI company ExScientia Ltd., and a USD 400M raise by the U.S. company Insitro Inc. Key technology advances enabling this activity include i) deep learning software and toolkits, ii) the availability of graphics processing unit (GPU) compute power, and iii) access to large relevant datasets for training and validation, all leading to many notable publications. However, as with all new technologies, there is always the need to align them to the optimal part of a business process, and arguably the pharmaceutical industry is just at the start of realizing the potential and understanding the key application areas to apply AI. The meeting brought together established thought leaders and practitioners reviewing the current reality of AI approaches in drug discovery.