Designing New Drugs Takes Years, but Insilico's A.I. Can Do It In Days Digital Trends

Between the fake news potential of deepfakes, the fear of robots stealing jobs, and the occasional call for automated systems to have control of the nuclear button, A.I.'s public image could do with a PR makeover here in 2019. Could saving a few million lives help? That's something a new biotech pharmaceutical startup called Insilico Medicine may be able to help with. Combining genomics, big data analysis, and deep learning, the company -- which is based in Rockville in Johns Hopkins University's Emerging Technology Centers -- has been using artificial intelligence algorithms to potentially discover the next world-changing drug. Using two of the most exciting and popular A.I. techniques of the moment, it's found a way of discovering drug molecules not only far more cheaply than usual, but also much, much, much faster.