Big Pharma is tapping AI for drug delivery process

It appears that Skynet wants us all on Big Pharma drugs, with British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) looking to AI to design better, more efficient - and I'm sure, more profitable drugs.

GSK announced a new partnership with Exscientia, a British company that specializes in drug design. The two will work toegther to use Exscienta's AI-enabled platform to discover new, high-quality drug candidate-quality molecules. GSK has tasked Exscientia to work on 10 specific disease-related targets, and if they hit those targets, GSK will write a cheque for $43 million in research payments.

The partnership will see the companies tapping into the power of supercomputers and machine learning in order to see how new compounds will behave, and by speeding this process up with the help of crazy amounts of computing power aided by AI, it will save the company both time and money. Human researchers are nowhere near as efficient as AI and supercomputers working every second of every day with a billion things going on at once, which could mark a very big change for medicine.

Exscientia CEO, Andrew Hopkins, said that his company's approach to discovery projects has already seen the delivery of potential treatments for other clients in just 25% of the time, and at just 25% of the traditional cost of other approaches. Reuters adds that it's not just GSK tapping AI, but other Big Pharma giants like Merck & Co, Johnson & Johnson, and Sanofi are all using technology to find new compounds.