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Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, and Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, director of the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Mads Claus Rasmussen/reuters Post Email Whatsapp
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Artificial intelligence will “revolutionize” the process by which drugs are discovered, chip giant Nvidia said this week, after unveiling a pilot project for Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk to use its new AI-powered supercomputer .
“Computer-aided drug discovery, I think that’s going to revolutionize the industry,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at a launch event for the computer, which researchers will use to train an AI model to facilitate vaccine design and analyze disease mutations, Bloomberg reported.
Machine learning has excited the pharma industry with its potential — for example, by scanning millions of possibilities to assess the effectiveness of shifting a drug to treat a different disease than first intended, replacing months of lab work.
One major breakthrough was Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold software, which predicts the structure and interactions of molecules — a previously complex, time-consuming process. Its inventors were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this month. SIGNALS
AI’s main advantages for drug discovery are speed and cost-cutting
Sources: JAMA, MIT Technology ReviewThe key advantages that AI brings to drug discovery are speed and cost-effectiveness. Without the technology, a new drug typically costs in excess of $1 billion to develop, and take more than a decade to reach the market , according to a 2020 study published in the journal JAMA. AI has the potential to reduce that timeline significantly, using machine learning models that sort through millions of pieces of data, predict how certain compounds may affect the body, and discard unsuccessful ones at the computer stage — currently a painstaking process carried out by humans in labs, the MIT Technology Review noted. “ It’s already doing a lot of the steps that we used to do by hand ,” a researcher told the outlet. The impact of AI-aided drug discovery is still unclear Source: BloombergA key test for pharma companies relying on AI will be understanding […]
Artificial intelligence will ‘revolutionize’ pharma industry, Nvidia says
