How artificial intelligence is helping in the search for new medications

Artificial intelligence is being used by companies to speed up the drug discovery process.

TechRepublic’s Karen Roby talked with Dr. Krishnan Nandabalan of InveniAI about the ways artificial intelligence (AI) is helping companies discover new medications. The following is an edited transcript of their interview.

Krishnan Nandabalan: AI could be considered as a force multiplier. If you look at the amount of data that the world has been gathering for the past few years, it kind of doubles every two years now, and if you take the medical field, especially on a daily basis, more than 5,000 publications are being added. It’s humanly impossible to actually keep track of all of these things, and seeing which of them are relevant to you in your specific area of investigational research, and what is not. And what was being done manually until about five years ago cannot be done manually anymore. There’s just too much data and information that’s flowing through the system. So you can think of AI as a way to comprehensively analyze all the data that’s available to you, whether it’s clinical data, whether it’s scientific data, whether it’s patient-recorded data, whether it’s data from hospitals, managed care, and all of these have an impact on the drug discovery and development process.

So to go into a little more detail, right? So you can think of new mechanisms or new chemical entities and new biological entities that can be designed to address certain diseases where no cures exist. Or further still, even for drugs that are approved, you can start following the performance in the real world. Whether patients are complying with the drugs that have been prescribed, or how are they actually responding? Are they responding in an efficacious and safe manner? Because clinical trials, no matter how well designed, do not actually reflect the real world. And now with things like wearables, I’m talking about instruments like the Apple Watch or the Fitbit, we can monitor heart rate, pulse, and soon there will be more instruments. I can even monitor blood sugar and things like that, and sleep patterns. 

All of this will actually help us understand how the human body is responding in a disease state to certain drugs and not responding to other drugs in a safe manner. And this will allow us to actually design safer and better drugs. Even if the improvement is incremental, that incremental improvement can have a huge impact on healthcare, especially the healthcare costs.