A drug “invented” by artificial intelligence (AI) will be used by humans is the world’s first medicine to be produced by machine learning.
The drug is produced by Japanese pharmaceutical firm Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma and British start-up Exscientia.
The drug is found to be successful in the treatment of the obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Mental health disease-causing patient’s anxiety and depression and mental disturbance due to occurrence of a repeated thought.
Generally, typical drug development takes about five years to get to trial and pass, but the AI drug miraculously took just 12 months. The performance and development technique of this drug makes it a key milestone in drug development and medical history.
Exscienta chief executive Prof Andrew Hopkins told the BBC: “We have seen AI for diagnosing patients and for analyzing patient data and scans, but this is direct use of AI in the creation of new medicine.”
The molecule – known as DSP-1181 – was developed by the usage of algorithms that examined through potential compounds, and was checked against a huge database of parameters.
“There are billions of decisions needed to find the right molecules and it is a huge decision to precise engineer a drug,” said Prof Hopkins.
“But the beauty of the algorithm is that they are agnostic, so can be applied to any disease,” he added.
The phase one trials of the first drug will happen in Japan which, if got thriving, will be followed by more global tests.
The firm is already working on other potential drugs and is hoping to have another molecule ready for clinical trials by the end of the year.
“This year was the first to have an AI-designed drug but by the end of the decade all new drugs could potentially be created by AI,” said Prof Hopkins.
This is the first example of a new drug developed by technologies like AI to be used on humans, the future seems very bright in the discovery of more scientific and medical stuff.
