Artificial intelligence is changing the way companies do business—helping programmers write code and fielding customer service calls with chatbots. But the pharmaceutical industry is still waiting to see whether AI can tackle its biggest challenge: finding faster, cheaper ways to develop new drugs. Despite billions poured into research, new medicines still typically take a decade or more to develop. Founded in 2018, Insitro is part of a growing field of AI companies promising to accelerate drug discovery by using machine learning to analyze huge datasets of chemical and biological markers. The South San Francisco-based company has signed deals with drugmakers like Eli Lilly and Bristol Myers Squibb to help develop medicines for metabolic diseases, neurological conditions, and degenerative disorders.
CEO and founder Daphne Koller spoke with the AP about what AI brings to the challenges of drug discovery. "One of the things that has been happening in parallel to the AI revolution is a much quieter revolution in what I call quantitative biology, which is the ability to measure biological systems with unprecedented fidelity. You can measure systems like proteins and cells with increasingly better measurements and technology," she says. "But if you give that data to a person, their eyes will just glaze over because there's only so many cells someone can look at and only so many subtleties they can see in these images. People are just limited in their ability to perceive subtle differences." That, she says, is where AI can be really useful. See the full interview at the AP.
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