AI transformer models touted to help design new drugs

Special report AI can study chemical molecules in ways scientists can't comprehend, automatically predicting complex protein structures and designing new drugs, despite having no real understanding of science. The power to design new drugs at scale is no longer limited to Big Pharma. Startups armed with the right algorithms, data, and compute can invent tens of thousands of molecules in just a few hours. New machine learning architectures, including transformers, are automating parts of the design process, helping scientists develop new drugs for difficult diseases like Alzheimer's, cancer, or rare genetic conditions. In 2017, researchers at Google came up with a method to build increasingly bigger and more powerful neural networks.