Science Is Becoming Less Human

This summer, a pill intended to treat a chronic, incurable lung disease entered mid-phase human trials. Previous studies have demonstrated that the drug is safe to swallow, although whether it will improve symptoms of the painful fibrosis that it targets remains unknown; this is what the current trial will determine, perhaps by next year. Such a tentative advance would hardly be newsworthy, except for a wrinkle in the medicine's genesis: It is likely the first drug fully designed by artificial intelligence to come this far in the development pipeline. The pill's maker, the biotech company Insilico Medicine, used hundreds of AI models to discover both a new target in the body that could treat the fibrosis and which molecules might be synthesized for the drug itself. Those programs allowed Insilico to go from scratch to putting this drug through the first phase of human trials in two and a half years, rather than the typical five or so.