AI Brings Speed to Drug Development But Not Yet Clinical Success

In mid-January, Genentech started recruiting 200 patients to test whether one of its experimental drugs can tame ulcerative colitis, a painful, incurable type of inflammatory bowel disease. Until then, the compound had only been given during experiments to treat lung and skin disorders. Deciding whether to shift a drug for use against a different disease than originally intended often takes years of painstaking lab work, but the California biotech did it in just nine months. The difference: artificial intelligence, which the company says helped its researchers scan millions of possibilities to confirm the drug could be useful against diseases ...