Artificial Intelligence: will it change the way drugs are discovered?

It was, in part, Tesla's self-driving car, first demonstrated in 2015, that finally got the pharmaceutical industry to take artificial intelligence (AI) seriously. That is according to Alex Zhavoronkov, chief executive officer of artificial intelligence start-up Insilico Medicine, based in Baltimore, Maryland. He says Tesla showed that AI really is feasible, and in the past couple of years the pharmaceutical industry investment tap has started to flow. This investment has been coupled with continued technological progress. "It previously took half a year to show something new," says Zhavoronkov, but currently every week his team messages him about an advance that makes him think "wow". The questions now are when the first AI-designed drugs will reach the market and whether AI will transform the process of drug discovery.