AlphaFold, DeepMind's protein structure program, is impressive because it reveals so much fundamental information about living organisms. Proteins are the building blocks of life, after all, and as such they are essential to life and to the development of medicines. Proteins can be drug targets, and they can themselves be drugs. In either case, it is important to know the intricate ways in which they fold into various shapes. Their coils, floppy bits, hidden pockets and sticky patches can control, for example, when a signal is sent between cells or if a process is turned on or off.

Zhavoronkov says AI can speed up and reduce costs for drug development which – involving several phases of clinical trials, government approval and licensing – can last more than a decade. "Moving to Hong Kong [which is a special administrative region of China] is the first step for us to go to China. The future for AI is in China as AI is about data and China has more data than any other country. The [Chinese] government also supports AI more than any other country," he says. "Hong Kong also has a great banking system and a great airport for you to fly pretty much everywhere in the world."

Insilico Medicine, named one of the world's top 20 artificial intelligence (AI) drug-development companies by Forbes Magazine, will move its headquarters from the United States to Hong Kong in April. The move from Baltimore to Hong Kong Science Park signals the importance the company places on the China market. Founded by Alex Zhavoronkov in 2014, the enterprise uses AI and deep learning – a subset of machine learning that imitates the workings of the human brain in processing data – for drug discovery and ageing research. Zhavoronkov's credentials are impressive: he has a master's degree in biotechnology from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a physics doctorate from Lomonosov Moscow State University, and is an adjunct professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Ageing in California. Zhavoronkov says AI can speed up and reduce costs for drug development which – involving several phases of clinical trials, government approval and licensing – can last more than a decade.

The researcher who invented Viagra and a colleague at Cambridge University have become the latest to join the ranks of drug developers using artificial intelligence and attracting attention from venture capitalists. Cambridge, UK-based Healx said Thursday that it had raised $10 million in a Series A funding round, led by London-based venture capital firm Balderton Capital. Fellow British venture capital firm Amadeus Capital Partners and Jonathan Milner – founder of life sciences supplier Abcam – also participated. Cambridge Rare Diseases Network founder Tim Guilliams and David Brown – who invented Pfizer's erectile dysfunction drug, which is now available as a generic – are the founders of Healx. The company uses the HealNet database, which maps more than 1 billion disease, patient and drug interactions and was built and maintained using machine learning techniques.

What does the youngest chief executive in Big Pharma want? When Vas Narasimhan, 41, took the helm of drug giant Novartis in February, he'd already put the project in motion. Novartis scouts were dispatched to visit air traffic control towers and the Swiss electrical grid to see how other industries dealt with torrents of data. Working with McKinsey's QuantumBlack unit, they built a software system called Nerve that not only keeps track of every data point on all 550 clinical trials testing Novartis drugs, but also uses analytic software to predict potential hiccups in the execution of those studies. Soon Narasimhan will be able to walk into mission control at the company's Basel, Switzerland, headquarters and call up whatever information he needs in an instant. "When you look at history, it takes the medical establishment 50 to 75 years to actually change how we do clinical studies," Narasimhan says.

London-based biotech business BenevolentBio is on a mission to overcome the failure of the drug industry to innovate on drug discovery. Andrew Huddart explains and talks to its chief executive, Jackie Hunter. The tools of big data are helping to reshape the industrial landscape of the 21st century. They are helping make entire economic activities obsolete and helping give rise to new ones. The area of health and drug discovery in particular is far from excluded from this change.

Links between licit and illicit economies fuel conflict in countries mired in irregular warfare. We argue that in Afghanistan, cultivating poppy and trading drugs bring stability to farmers who face the unintended consequences of haphazard development efforts while lacking alternative livelihoods and security necessary to access markets. Drug trafficking funds the crime-insurgency nexus and government corruption, in turn foiling attempts to establish a unified governance body. We show how individual rationality, market forces, corruption and opium stocks accumulated at different stages in the supply chain counteract the effects of poppy eradication. To that end, we use initial results from a multiagent model of the Afghan drug industry. We define physical, administrative, social and infrastructural environments in the simulation, and outline objectives and inputs for decision making and the structure of actor interactions.