AI, deep learning systems could transform Big Pharma

Insilico Medicine will unveil a newly-developed Artificial Intelligence (AI) drug discovery engine at the Re-Work Machine Intelligence Summit in Berlin, Germany, to be held June 29-30, 2016. The AI engine is capable of predicting therapeutic use, toxicity, and adverse effects of thousands of molecules. Insilico says that this drug-discovery engine has the potential to transform the pharmaceutical industry and double the number of drugs on the market by "developing multi-modal deep-learned and parametric biomarkers as well as multiple drug-scoring pipelines for drug discovery and drug repurposing, and hypothesis and lead generation." By using AI coupled with a deep understanding of pharmaceutical R&D processes, Insilico hopes to overcome hurdles to drug discovery, such as failure rates due to irreproducible experiments with poor choices of animal models and the inability to translate the results from animal models directly to humans. Up until now, Insilico has dealt mainly with nutraceuticals and cosmetics, signing an exclusive agreement with Life Extension, a vendor of major nutraceutical products, to develop a set of geroprotectors, which are natural products that mimic a young, healthy state in multiple old tissues.