The Mix of Mind and Machine
We are witnessing a renaissance of AI in all areas of medicinal chemistry. The previous wave of excitement crested roughly 30 years ago with the first applications of neural networks, inference systems and other machine learning models. After much debate, and too little in the way of convincing applications, the scare was quickly over again. Now the spectre of AI is back, this time, apparently, for good. The combination of laboratory automation and innovative software solutions for process planning and drug design promises better drugs, discovered and delivered faster. Medicinal chemists are exploring, adopting and adapting this technology. The prospects for this mixture of machine and mind in drug discovery are huge.
See the latest comment by Gisbert Schneider in Nature Machine Intelligence 1, 128-130 (2019).
Image credit: Jack Burgess