Artificial intelligence will “revolutionize” the process by which drugs are discovered, chip giant Nvidia said this week, after unveiling a pilot project for Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk to use its new AI-powered supercomputer.
“Computer-aided drug discovery, I think that’s going to revolutionize the industry,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at a launch event for the computer, which researchers will use to train an AI model to facilitate vaccine design and analyze disease mutations, Bloomberg reported.
Machine learning has excited the pharma industry with its potential — for example, by scanning millions of possibilities to assess the effectiveness of shifting a drug to treat a different disease than first intended, replacing months of lab work.
One major breakthrough was Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold software, which predicts the structure and interactions of molecules — a previously complex, time-consuming process. Its inventors were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this month.