Pharma's AlphaGo Moment: For First Time AI Has Designed and Validated a New Drug in Days

This is Pharma's AlphaGo moment when the potential for AI to radically transform the normal operating procedures and business models of the entire industry becomes tangibly obvious to the public. In the case of the AI industry, this happened in 2015, when AI company DeepMind succeeded in developing the first AI capable of beating a human Go champion in Go. This study by Insilico Medicine may be an analogous game-changing moment for Pharma. While it typically takes 2-3 years to go from initial drug discovery to preclinical validation, Insilico Medicine has done this in less than 2 months end-to-end. This is 15 times faster than Pharma companies capable of conducting the most efficient R&D processes. In a landmark study published in Nature Biotechnology on September 2, 2019, Insilico Medicine showed that they generated and validated a novel small molecule in just 46 days, and designed the drug from scratch based on specified molecular properties in just 21 days.