Artificial intelligence system develops drugs from scratch

The research comes from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and it demonstrates how an artificial-intelligence design can teach itself how to design new drug molecules from scratch. Such a system could accelerate the design of new drug candidates for use across pharmaceuticals and healthcare. The new device is named "Reinforcement Learning for Structural Evolution" (abbreviated to ReLeaSE). The artificial intelligence is in the form of an algorithm which has been configured to work with a computer program, based on two neural networks. The networks are described by the researchers as being akin to a teacher and a student.