How AI could help develop drugs

Also: Abortions hit highest number in over a decade, despite some state bans [Donate ❤️]( [View in Browser](  March 19, 2024 Hi CommonHealth reader, Creating new treatments for diseases is an [expensive, time-intensive process]( that typically involves lots of failure. Often, it takes over a decade to make one new drug. And most treatments that initially appear promising in the lab never make it to pharmacy shelves. Could artificial intelligence change that? Many biotech and pharmaceutical companies are [already diving in](. They — and their investors — are betting the newest generation of AI can help unleash novel treatments for everything from COVID-19 to cancer and chronic diseases. While computers — even super smart ones — aren’t developing the drugs themselves, they are helping researchers[reimagine the drug discovery process]( and identify strategies that may be more likely to succeed. Some say AI could make the entire process faster and cheaper. That’s the hope, anyway. I recently spoke with the leaders of several Boston-area biotech companies that are tapping AI to help develop new drugs. Somerville-based Generate:Biomedicines is using AI to generate amino acid sequences for proteins that don’t exist in nature. The proteins are then made and tested in the company's labs. The idea is to expand exponentially the universe of proteins with disease-fighting potential. The company recently started clinical trials for an asthma treatment and a COVID monoclonal antibody treatment using some of the proteins generated with help from AI. Generate:Biomedicines' CEO Mike Nally says the trial is fully enrolled, and all 50 people have received the COVID antibody infusions without major safety concerns. The treatment was developed with astonishing speed. “Our COVID program was 17 months from concept to clinic,” said Nally. The average for comparable treatments is more like [five to six years](. He believes this is just the start for AI. “It’s going to be faster in the future,” Nally said. “These sort of technologies, I think, will allow us to provide a better line of defense against nature's greatest threats.” AI programs excel at handling enormous amounts of data, and looking for patterns and connections within it. Montai, a Cambridge-based drug company, has trained its AI to comb through the chemistry of foods and other commonly ingested substances that are already known to benefit human health. CEO Margo Georgiadis says the AI has helped identify more than 125,000 molecules with strong potential to be starting points to develop safe treatments for chronic diseases, like inflammation. “Think about it as creating a massive human chemist in the cloud that is able to look at any piece of chemistry, no matter how diverse it is,” she explained. Of course, AI systems are only as good as the information humans put into them, and there are plenty of gaps in our knowledge. 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