90% of drugs fail in the phase 1-3 trials. If AI could create drug candidates that fail less often, that would be a huge win. I doubt it can right now, and it would take years to decades and billions of dollars to figure out if the AI is actually better at that than humans.

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refurb 21 hours ago | parent [-]

That is true - that if AI reduced failure rates it would be a huge success.

However drugs fail because we don’t understand the biology well enough. Drug researchers develop drugs based on all their knowledge of biology, and when they fail it’s because the biology didn’t work the way they thought it did.

So if the current understanding is the cause of failure how can AI help? It can chug through vast amounts of data, but the data doesn’t explain the biology well enough.

Now what?

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XenophileJKO 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Just like all the mathematicians were applying all that they know to solve the math problems.. and AI certainly can't do that...

Yes, biology is different and experimental evidence is very different than mathmatics, but the ability to pull from a lot of known information and formulate possible problems that biologists didn't anticipate isn't really a stretch from where we are on the capability curve right now.

	▲	refurb 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Math is an entirely different problem to solve. Look at the showcase AI proof of the Naiver-Stokes existence. It basically took an equation and proved it was valid across all possible variables. That’s a problem in a closed system. There is no question how the function works. The tools needed to solve it are known. Biology is like solving a math equation we only have a crude approximation for. Parts of the equation are missing and there are variables we aren’t aware of. You also have a limited set of tools to test the equation.