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AI is dreaming up drugs that no one has ever seen. Now we've got to see if they work. | MIT Technology Review

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AI automation throughout the drug development pipeline is opening up the possibility of faster, cheaper pharmaceuticals. At 82 years old, with an aggressive form of blood cancer that six courses of chemotherapy had failed to eliminate, Paul appeared to be out of options. With each long and unpleasant round of treatment, his doctors had been working their way down a list of common cancer drugs, hoping to hit on something that would prove effective—and crossing them off one by one. The usual cancer killers were not doing their job. With nothing to lose, Paul’s doctors enrolled him in a trial set up by the Medical University of Vienna in Austria, where he lives. (Paul's real name is not known because his identify was obscured in the trial.) The university was testing a new matchmaking technology developed by a UK-based company called Exscientia that pairs individual patients with the precise drugs they need, taking into account the subtle biological differences between people. The researc

AI is dreaming up drugs that no one has ever seen. Now we've got to see if they work. | MIT Technology Review Skip to Content Curio · MITTR | AI is dreaming up drugs that no one has ever seen. Now we’ve got to see if they work. At 82 years old, with an aggressive form of blood cancer that six courses of chemotherapy had failed to eliminate, Paul appeared to be out of options. With each long and unpleasant round of treatment, his doctors had been working their way down a list of common cancer drugs, hoping to hit on something that would prove effective—and crossing them off one by one. The usua

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