Stanford researchers develop AI that can predict pharmaceutical drug interactions

For many Americans, taking prescription pills is a part of a never-ending routine. About seven out of ten people take at least one drug, according to the Mayo Clinic, and as many as 15 percent take five or more. The trouble is, it's difficult to predict the side effects that might result from polypharmacy, or the practice of combining drugs; by some estimates, there are more than 125 billion potential complications. "It's practically impossible to test a new drug in combination with all other drugs, because just for one drug that would be five thousand new experiments," Marinka Zitnik, a postdoctoral fellow in computer science at Stanford, said. "[T]ruly, we don't know what will happen."