Artificial Intelligence for new drug discovery -- Opinion -- The Guardian Nigeria News – Nigeria and World News

The world is making rapid progress in the areas of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. These are the core drivers of what many analysts have come to refer to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, epitomised by the increased whittling away of the boundaries that hitherto existed between the physical, digital and biological worlds. There is a clear imperative for pharmacists, pharmaceutical scientists and medical professionals in the field of research and development in developing countries like Nigeria, to increasingly tap into this world of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and partake of the revolution that is happening before our very eyes. And the reason is simple. Artificial Intelligence is helping to make pharmaceutical research and new drug discovery less expensive and definitely more productive. Researchers realise that in the time that it would have taken to test the efficacy of say a handful of chemical molecules manually, with AI, it is possible to test several hundreds of different chemical molecules.