More Japanese companies are incorporating artificial intelligence into their research and development in fields like pharmaceuticals and chemicals where overseas rivals have a head start in using AI to speed up breakthroughs. Astellas Pharma and chemicals group Asahi Kasei are among the companies set to roll out AI-assisted development platforms.

DeepMind, the British artificial intelligence (AI) company owned by Google, has solved a 50-year-old problem in biology. DeepMind's AI system, AlphaFold, cracked the so-called'protein folding problem' – figuring out how a protein's amino acid sequence dictates its 3D atomic structure. A protein's structure is closely linked with its function, and the ability to predict its structure unlocks a greater understanding of what it does and how it works. AlphaFold's neural network was trained with 170,000 known protein sequences and their different structures. The system registered an average accuracy score of 92.4 out of 100 for predicting protein structure, and a score of 87 in the category for most challenging proteins. Because almost all diseases, including cancer and Covid-19, are related to a protein's 3D structure, the AI could pave the way for faster development of treatments and drug discoveries by determining the structure of previously-unknown proteins.