AI and Biotechnology
Biotech is applying AI and Machine Learning to drug development and here’s why.
The human body is complex and when it comes to making drugs that end up in pharmacies or given at hospitals, it takes a lot of effort to make sure that treatment is safe and effective.
Drug discovery is also a complex and expensive process that involves the identification of compounds that can treat or prevent diseases. Scientists manually create hundreds of potential drug leads. There are always a few different projects running in the background of academic labs, biotech labs or pharmaceutical labs. It takes years to find a drug that’s worked well enough in a lab bench and in animals. It takes time to get something called an Investigational New Drug (IND) approval. This allows for scientists to start clinical trials. But oftentimes, throughout the 6-10 years of clinical trials, the drug ends up failing. If at any point the drug does not work the way it should in humans, or it’s not as effective as they thought, or they just aren’t able to get enough data, the research stops and all the effort used on this drug gets re-allocated to a new one. Only about 5% of drugs really make it through all the hurdles of pre-clinical and clinical testing.
The process of getting new drugs to the market takes a whole lot of time, money, and effort. A new wave of drug development platforms using AI is helping many biotech companies also gather data faster. The integration of AI into biotechnology has had significant effects on various aspects of the field, including drug discovery, gene editing, and personalized medicine. By using AI as a predictive tool, you can save some of the effort in trying to find good drug leads. AI algorithms can analyze large datasets and predict the efficacy of potential drug candidates with greater accuracy than traditional methods. Instead of finding a needle in a haystack, AI makes a bunch of needles for you. It can better identify leads, saving us time, money and effort on drugs that might not work. This can help with difficult to treat diseases that we may be stuck on solving.
AI has already been used for drug discovery. For the first time ever, a covid-19 drug was designed by AI, and what usually takes 2-3 years, took about 8 months before this company received approval for clinical testing! I mean there was a point where the human genome project took 10 years, and now it is just a task on a scientist daily to do list to check off. Machine learning and AI has the power to make drug development one day potentially become so fast and easy.
Devereson, A., Sandler, C., & The, L. (2022, November 16). How AI could revolutionize drug discovery. McKinsey & Company. Retrieved March 4, 2023, from https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/how-ai-could-revolutionize-drug-discovery
N/A. (n.d.). How ai could speed drug discovery. Morgan Stanley. Retrieved March 4, 2023, from https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/ai-drug-discovery
