Drugs discovered by AI: the state of play June 2024

Reading: Use of Artificial Intelligence in Drug Development, Druedahl et al., JAMA Network Open, Health Policy Research Letter, 31 May 2024

A different approach to assessing how AI is used in drug discovery, compared to the one I posted last month. This one is looking at the ~102.5k investigational and approved drugs to see if and how AI was used. They found 164 drugs:

Uploaded image — Figure 2 from the paper, showing uses of AI (top) and therapeutic area (bottom).

The broad range of uses matches what I’ve been reading. The count seems low, or “modest” as they put it in the paper.

They suggest lack of quality data may be the bottleneck. That’s a focus of a bunch of companies, as profiled in How A.I. Is Revolutionizing Drug Development in the New York Times (17 June 2024).

They found an approved drug that used AI:

For the 1 approved drug, which was the stem cell therapy remestemcel-L, a bayesian method was used to estimate the likelihood of obtaining significant results on the primary end point at study completion.

That seems like later stage AI usage, rather than core discovery by AI.

ai drug-discovery