To hear Silicon Valley tell it, the end of disease is well on its way. Demis Hassabis, a Nobel laureate for his AI research and the CEO of Google DeepMind, said on Sunday that he hopes that AI will be able to solve important scientific problems and help "cure all disease" within five to 10 years. Earlier this month, OpenAI released new models and touted their ability to "generate and critically evaluate novel hypotheses" in biology, among other disciplines. These are all executives marketing their products, obviously, but is there even a kernel of possibility in these predictions? If generative AI could contribute in the slightest to such discoveries--as has been promised since the start of the AI boom--where would the technology and scientists using it even begin?

Zhavoronkov says his drug is special because AI software not only helped decide what target inside a cell to interact with, but also what the drug's chemical structure should be. Popular forms of AI can draw pictures and answer questions. But there's a growing effort to get AI to dream up cures for awful diseases, too. That may be why Jensen Huang, president of Nvidia, which sells AI chips and servers, claimed in December that "digital biology" is going to be the "next amazing revolution" for AI. "This is going to be flat out one of the biggest ones ever," he said.

This week Insilico Medicine announced the launch of Life Star - their AI powered 6th generation robotics lab for drug discovery. This state of the art lab is equipped with several types of autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) and advanced imaging devices. The AGV robots are driven by AI and guided by radar. The robots - which are completely controlled by AI - connect all of the automation modules in the lab. Insilico's lab is different from every other lab because Life Star is a 6th generation lab, meaning it does not require any human intervention.

Drug discovery companies such as Insilico Medicine are using deepfake AI technology to design new molecules that can help treat diseases. Intel made a splash earlier this week when it unveiled its latest technology that can detect a deepfake in real-time with 96pc accuracy. AI such as this can help organisations around the world to prevent the spread of misinformation and protect themselves from cybercrime. But not all kinds of deepfakes are bad. The advancement of any emerging technology brings with it positive and negative uses – and the future of healthcare certainly has much to gain from deepfakes.

Hong Kong-based drug discovery and development company Insilico has secured fresh capital at a time that its CEO described as a "biotech winter." The firm has raised $35 million on the heels of its last tranche in June, bringing its total Series D investment to $95 million. The new round was "oversubscribed", the firm's founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov told TechCrunch, declining to disclose the company's valuation. Prosperity7, the venture capital arm of Saudi Arabia's state oil company Aramco, led the new capital infusion. The fund has been actively scouring for opportunities in and around China that can scale globally and particularly in the Middle East.

Today Insilico Medicine announced the completion of a second closing of its Series D round, led by Prosperity7 Ventures, the diversified growth fund of Saudi Aramco Ventures, bringing the total Series D financing to $95 million. Other global investors with expertise in the biopharmaceutical and life sciences sectors also participated. The financing brought in Prosperity7 as a new investor, alongside current investors in the Series D round, including a large, diversified asset management firm on the US West Coast, B Capital Group, Warburg Pincus, BHR Partners, Qiming Venture Partners, Deerfield, Pavilion Capital, BOLD Capital Partners, and WS Investment Company. Insilico's founder and CEO, Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, also invested in the Series D round. Insilico Medicine plans to grow its presence in Saudi Arabia, building on the recent investment from Prosperity7.

Updated An oral medication designed by scientists with the help of AI algorithms could one day treat patients with COVID-19 and other types of diseases caused by coronaviruses. Insilico Medicine, a biotech startup based in New York, announced on Tuesday it had nominated a drug candidate for preclinical trials – the stage before you start testing it on humans. Today's mRNA vaccines boost the body's immunity to COVID-19 by aiding the generation of antibodies capable of blocking the virus's spike protein, stopping the bio-nasty from infecting cells. The small molecule developed by Insilico, however, is used to treat people already infected, and works by preventing the coronavirus from replicating. The preclinical candidate has a specialized structure to target the 3C-like (3CL) protease, an enzyme involved in the viral reproduction of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, Feng Ren, Insilico's chief scientific officer, explained.

Special report AI can study chemical molecules in ways scientists can't comprehend, automatically predicting complex protein structures and designing new drugs, despite having no real understanding of science. The power to design new drugs at scale is no longer limited to Big Pharma. Startups armed with the right algorithms, data, and compute can invent tens of thousands of molecules in just a few hours. New machine learning architectures, including transformers, are automating parts of the design process, helping scientists develop new drugs for difficult diseases like Alzheimer's, cancer, or rare genetic conditions. In 2017, researchers at Google came up with a method to build increasingly bigger and more powerful neural networks.

Deep learning in biopharma has come of age. After working for years to understand how to apply an artificial intelligence (AI) approach to biotechnology, Insilico Medicine recently disclosed the discovery of a novel drug target and novel molecule using AI. The discovery, a world first, took less than 18 months and cost 10% as much as a conventional program. Having validated its platforms, Insilico is now making the technology available to big pharmaceutical companies. Insilico was founded in 2014 by a team of long-term academic collaborators, Alex Zhavoronkov and Alex Aliper.

For several years we have been hearing about the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve traditional drug discovery and development. In the last two years, clinical trials have begun. The UK's Exscientia made headlines last April by announcing the start of a Phase 1 clinical trial for a drug it designed using AI for an established protein target. Recursion Pharmaceuticals in Utah uses AI to find new uses for the drugs owned by other companies. Insilico Medicine has now announced the crucial next step: the start of the world's first Phase 1 clinical trial of a drug developed from scratch using AI.