AI’s Revolutionary Impact on the Pharmaceutical Industry
A new pharmaceutical drug, discovered and designed by artificial intelligence (AI), is now in Phase 2 clinical trials after a notably short 46-day plan development period. The biotech company Insilico Medicine is behind this remarkable progress, utilizing AI to design a molecule that targets a protein in fibrosis.
Accelerated Drug Discovery Process
Just four years ago, the AI drug was only a concept. However, the company managed to train their model on existing drugs for the protein, significantly accelerating the process to reach human clinical trial stages. This successful application of AI technology demonstrates its potential to expedite drug discovery processes traditionally known for their extensive time and resource consumption.
Cost-effective and Efficient
As an average, only one molecule out of every million screened makes it to the clinical trials and approval phases of production, a process that typically takes 12 to 15 years and incurs an estimated cost of $1 billion. By contrast, the AI’s 46-day discovery period and the drug’s four-year journey to clinical trials is highly efficient and cost-effective.
AI’s Potential in Drug Design
AI technology continues to improve and become more accessible. With an increasing volume of training data, it could potentially discover and design effective drugs even faster. Insilico’s idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis drug has already reduced the time and cost of drug development by a third and a tenth, respectively, a promising indicator of future possibilities for reducing pharmaceutical prices.
AI Technology in Drug Design
Insilico employed two different forms of AI to design the drug: a generative adversarial network (GAN) and reinforcement learning. The GAN uses two neural networks to generate new objects, such as molecule chemical structures, with one network generating an output and the other determining its accuracy. On the other hand, the reinforcement learning AI learns through a trial-and-error process based on its own feedback.
Clinical Trials and Future Prospects
For the Phase 2 human trials, 60 patients from China and the US with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis have been enrolled to test the AI-designed drug, INS018_055, for 12 weeks. This phase will assess the drug’s safety and efficacy. If successful, the drug will move on to Phase 3 trials, where its side effects and efficacy will be examined across a larger sample size.
The success of these trials could have profound implications for the future of AI in the pharmaceutical industry, possibly heralding a new era of rapid and cost-effective drug discovery and development.