IBM Thinks It Can Crack Pharmaceutical Code with AI
December 20, 2017
Artificial intelligence has been tasked with solving every problem from famine to climate change to helping you pick a new favorite song. So, it should come as no surprise that IBM thinks it can revolutionize another industry with AI. We learned exactly what from a Digital Trends story, “IBM’s New AI Predicts Chemical Reactions, Could Revolutionize Drug Development.”
According to the story,
As described in a new research paper, the A.I. chemist is able to predict chemical reactions in a way that could be incredibly important for fields like drug discovery. To do this, it uses a highly detailed data set of knowledge on 395,496 different reactions taken from thousands of research papers published over the years.
Teo Laino, one of the researchers on the project from IBM Research in Zurich, told Digital Trends that it is a great example of how A.I. can draw upon large quantities of knowledge that would be astonishingly difficult for a human to master — particularly when it needs to be updated all the time.
It’s an absolutely valid plan, but we aren’t sure if IBM is the one to really pull off this trick. IBM trying to work in big pharma seems kind of like your uncle tinkering on his “inventions” out in the shed. We’d rather see someone whose primary focus is AI and medicine, like Certara, PhinC, and Chem Abstracts.
Patrick Roland, December 20, 2017
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