How Artificial Intelligence Is Revolutionizing Drug Discovery - Liwaiwai

AI technologies are catalysing the initial and most crucial step in the biopharmaceutical value chain. The process of drug discovery has been historically slow, labour-intensive, failure-prone, and costly. Its four main stages, as shown below, typically take around five to six years to attain completion. This is a huge amount of time, especially during crisis situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic and considering the fact that drug research and discovery is only the first step in the biopharmaceutical value chain -- all in all it would take about a decade to finish the entirety of this process. Looking back in the past, discoveries were made mostly due to accidents and unexpected observations, like that of penicillin.