alt Hacker News90% 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.
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?