Supercomputers Are Stocking Next Generation Drug Pipelines

Developing new drugs is notoriously inefficient. Fewer than 12 percent of all drugs entering clinical trials end up in pharmacies, and it costs about $2.6 billion to bring a drug to market. There are so many molecules to test that pharmaceutical researchers use pipetting robots to test a few thousand variants all at once. The best candidates then go into animal models or cell cultures, where hopefully a few will go on to bigger animal and human clinical trials. Which is why more and more drug developers are turning to computers and artificial intelligence to narrow down the list of potential drug molecules--saving time and money on those downstream tests.