AI Helps Pharma Find New Drugs But Imperils Lucrative Patents

Artificial intelligence has emerged as a double-edged sword for pharmaceutical companies, helping to develop new cures while also creating obstacles to obtaining drug patents potentially worth billions.

A vast trove of AI creations would make it increasingly difficult for companies to convince patent offices around the world their inventions are novel, minimizing their incentives to invest the massive sums necessary to find new treatments, attorneys say.

Pharmaceutical clients are already facing what they suspect is AI-generated prior art—the term for evidence showing that an invention is already known and therefore ineligible for a new patent—during the patent application process, attorneys ...