How AI Is Transforming Drug Creation

But samples also were sent to a lab where computers using artificial intelligence are changing the way pharmaceutical companies develop drugs. Biological insights driven by machine learning also could help pharmaceutical companies better identify and recruit patients for clinical trials of therapies most likely to work for them, perhaps boosting the chances of those medications' getting approved by regulatory agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration. AI systems trained on various data sources, including preclinical data sets, have helped make "significant performance improvements" by enabling "better selections of which compounds to…make and test" in the lab and by "flagging" whether compounds might have "toxic" effects or "unexpected favorable" ones, he says. German pharmaceutical company Merck KGaA has developed two drugs using computer-vision software, which analyzes images of cells and tissues, and other AI systems capable of drawing insights from public databases of genetic and chemical information, says Joern-Peter Halle, Merck KGaA's head of external innovation.