Two groups use artificial intelligence to find compounds that could fight the novel coronavirus

AI-based efforts like this could help to conserve drug researchers' time and resources, says Mike Tarselli, scientific director of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening. "The use of AI to augment human capacity, to address a pressing public health concern using existing data without re-deploying a full team, should be a boon to researchers." The BenevolentAI report is "more a testimony to good literature searching and curation" than "a triumph of artificial intelligence," according to veteran drug-discovery researcher and blogger Derek Lowe. He says anyone could search through the extensive kinase literature to find good drug candidates, but he acknowledges that the researchers likely sped up their search with a well-organized database and software good at searching through it.