Will AI speed up discovery of a coronavirus cure?

It feels as if a superhuman effort is needed to help ease the global pandemic killing so many. Artificial intelligence may have been hyped - but when it comes to medicine, it already has a proven track record. There is no shortage of companies trying to solve the dilemma. Oxford-based Exscientia, the first to put an AI-discovered drug into human trial, is trawling through 15,000 drugs held by the Scripps research institute, in California. And Healx, a Cambridge company set up by Viagra co-inventor Dr David Brown, has repurposed its AI system developed to find drugs for rare diseases.