AI is reinventing the way we invent

Drug discovery is a hugely expensive and often frustrating process. Medicinal chemists must guess which compounds might make good medicines, using their knowledge of how a molecule's structure affects its properties. They synthesize and test countless variants, and most are failures. "Coming up with new molecules is still an art, because you have such a huge space of possibilities," says Barzilay. "It takes a long time to find good drug candidates." By speeding up this critical step, deep learning could offer far more opportunities for chemists to pursue, making drug discovery much quicker.