How AI helps scientists design the next generation of medicines

MIT Technology Review · 2 months ago · 11

Pharmaceutical companies like AstraZeneca are deploying AI to accelerate drug design by computationally generating and prioritizing protein candidates, then testing only the most promising ones in the lab. The company estimates AI combined with computational tools could cut drug discovery timelines by as much as 50%. This shifts drug development toward faster iteration cycles and eventually toward fully AI-designed biologics that begin as entirely new protein sequences optimized computationally before any lab testing.