Alphabet founds subsidiary to research drugs through AI

The current coronavirus pandemic makes it clear how important it can be to develop drugs and vaccines and bring them to market quickly and easily. Pfizer is currently giving hope to many people; with Paxlovid, the company has developed a drug for the possible treatment of COVID-19. But it still usually takes around ten years for a preparation to go through all phases from development to marketing.

Alphabet wants to demonstrate that this could change soon. The parent company of Google has founded a new company called Isomorphic Labs, which is supposed to bring new drugs to market in less time with the help of artificial intelligence. The AlphaFold2 model developed by DeepMind is intended to predict the shape of proteins in the human body and thus develop the best treatment for many ailments.

That could not only bring a time advantage. The development of new drugs usually costs up to 2.6 billion dollars, this cost factor could be significantly reduced by artificial intelligence. Because a computer can calculate all possible scenarios 24 hours a day without having to take a break or pay.

With the inclusion of artificial intelligence, Alphabet is not alone for a long time. Pfizer has years of experience with the Watson system from IBM, and the pharmaceutical giant UBC recently teamed up with Microsoft to find new preparations of the future with the help of the Azure Cloud. And then there’s AstraZeneca, which has partnered with NVIDIA.

In the future it will have to be shown whether the simulation of many different connections in theory can also help to achieve a breakthrough in the long term, but especially in the current times such new approaches would be a relief for humanity.

The start-up of Alphabet definitely shows one thing. The industry is certain that AI models are now so advanced that they can solve such complex challenges. Maybe we will soon be living a few years longer thanks to artificial intelligence.

Via Gizmodo