A.I. Finds Ways to Legally Copy Drugs Pharma Spends Billions Developing Digital Trends

Drug companies spend billions developing and protecting their trademark pharmaceuticals. Could artificial intelligence be about to shake things up? In a breakthrough development, researchers have demonstrated an A.I. which can find new methods for producing existing drugs in a way that doesn't infringe on existing patents. Called Chematica, the software platform does something called "retrosynthesis," similar to the kind of reverse engineering that takes place when an engineer dissects an existing product to see how it works. In the case of Chematica, this process is based on a deep knowledge of how chemical interactions take place.