AI in drug discovery — what it is, where we stand and the path forward

I'm a structural biologist at a mid-sized biotech. I use AI tools daily. They make accomplishing the same things I was able to accomplish before quite a lot faster and easier. They don't help me magically accomplish new things that I couldn't previously.

For example, it helps me install academic software, debug things. It helps me take a large dataset and write scripts to ask questions. It helps me go through experiment drafts to see if I'm missing things. It helps me remember obscure formulas I use every 6 months. It has not, at least in my experience, come up with anything truly novel.

A concrete example: AlphaFold is great...to come up with a starting model for a chimeric fusion or something. What would have taken me 1-2 hours fumbling around in PDB or CIF files is now a quick prompt.

Derek Lowe discusion of the paper https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/so-how-ai-drug-dis...

I think that was originally linked but got changed to the £30 to Elsevier version for some reason.

Need one for hair loss ASAP.

We're all about to come face to face with this reality. This dance can only last so long.

How refreshing was this article vs. all the slop?

The lack of comparable data and testability really does seem to be a challenge. I wonder if people would be more willing to collect and share lots of health data if the collecting company was a non-profit dedicated to anonymizing it.

[AI drug discovery] was never the hard part.

need one for brain plasicity. it would be nice to be able to easily learn a foreign language or musical instrument naturally.

nerd-fanboi proposal: Articles by national treasures (like Derek Lowe, Raymond Chen) should be highlighted with specific identifiers on HN - like a distinctive title font or an ascii diamond ◊.

> "The paper goes on to make recommendations for AI companies and investigators, and these are well worth reading. The common theme is that people need to think more about why they’re doing certain techniques or using certain technologies, rather than just using them because they’re newly available."

Please. Please let some people with power and influence understand this lesson sooner rather than later. I understand the reasons that's unlikely to occur, but usually the impact isn't quite so drastic and expensive as this is. Just because something is new and shiny doesn't mean that it'll produce the outcomes you need at the other end, and until it's shown that capability your approach to it should be MODERATE.

Has this yet produced a treatment for AI psychosis?

No? Well fancy that! :)