Where are all artificial intelligence medications?

A new drug It usually starts with a disaster.

Peter Rey knows this. Ray was born in Zimbabwe, the son of a mechanics and a radiology technician, Ray, along with his family, fled to South Africa during the Zimbabwe Freedom War. He remembers the journey there in 1980 in the convoy of armored cars. As the sun was falling, a soldier taught Ray 8 -year -old how to shoot the machine gun. But his mother had to stop. He didn’t feel good.

Doctors in Cape Town found him with cancer. Ray recalls that with him, hospital rooms, clostomy bags go to his radiation. He loved the beach, liked to walk along the line where the water had met. But it was harder for him. Sometimes he was coming home from the hospital for a while, and things seemed to get better. Ray raised his hopes. Then everything is separated again. Surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy – the treatment that was on the table in the 1980s – was soon tired. While he was dying, he promised him to make some kind of change. He was 13 years old.

Ray received his education to become a pharmaceutical chemist, first in South Africa, loan to fund his education, then at the University of Liverpool. He has worked in numerous projects in pharmaceutical companies throughout the UK. Now, at the age of 53, he is one of the main designers of the drug in a pharmaceutical company called Recursion. She thinks a lot about that promise. “It’s all my life with me,” she says. “I have to get drugs on the market that affects cancer.”

A tendency to prevent your disaster for someone else may be a strong motivation. But the process of drug discovery has always been extremely heavy, very slow. First, chemists like Ray Zero – usually a protein, a long string of amino acids that are wrapped and folded. They call it a model on their computer screen and watch it turns it into a black vacuum. They pay attention to curves and notifications at its surface, places where a molecule, which can sail like a spacecraft through darkness, can do pier. Then, the atom by the atom, they try to make the spaceship.

When the new molecule is ready, chemists are transferred to biologists who are tested in living cells in hot rooms. More tragedy: Many cells die for reasons that are not always known. Biology is complex and the new drug does not work as expected. Chemists have been forced to create another and another for years. One biologist, Kate Micole of Insilico Medicine, told me about his experience in a different pharmaceutical company. After five years of work, their best molecules were not anticipated, which meant that they could no longer do it. “A large team of chemists, a large team of biologists, thousands of molecules, and there is no real progress,” he said.

If a team is very lucky, they receive a molecule that in mice does what it is supposed to do. They take an opportunity to give it to a small group of healthy human volunteers, a first -stage experimental stage. If the volunteers stay healthy, they will secondly give it to more people, including people with the desired illness. If people do not get sick, they will have the opportunity – Phase 3 – it to the more sick, the more they can, as much as possible.

At each stage, for reasons that few people understand and are less likely to predict, large boats are destroyed. More than 90 % of hopes fail in this way. When you meet drug hunters, you may be cautious, cautiously ask them if they have had a drug. “This is very rare,” says Micole. “We’re unicorn.”