AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward

I'm a structural biologist at a mid-sized biotech. I use AI tools daily. They make accomplishing the same things I was able to accomplish before quite a lot faster and easier. They don't help me magically accomplish new things that I couldn't previously.For example, it helps me install academic software, debug things. It helps me take a large dataset and write scripts to ask questions. It helps me go through experiment drafts to see if I'm missing things. It helps me remember obscure formulas I use every 6 months. It has not, at least in my experience, come up with anything truly novel.A concrete example: AlphaFold is great...to come up with a starting model for a chimeric fusion or something. What would have taken me 1-2 hours fumbling around in PDB or CIF files is now a quick prompt. reply: do you feel this is the same trade off of UI builders like android studio (or msvb6). you do in minutes what you previously did in 2, 3 hours.is it all the work? no, but it's a part that's early on and have high perceived impact.then, as you progress, that tool actually gets in the way and a new feature that would take 2 hours, now is around 2 days.

Derek Lowe discusion of the paper https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/so-how-ai-drug-dis...I think that was originally linked but got changed to the £30 to Elsevier version for some reason. reply: OP here: the title of the thread still links to Derek Lowe's blog post, but the article discussed in the blog post was added to the body of the original post (not by me).

We're all about to come face to face with this reality. This dance can only last so long. reply: >We're all about to come face to face with this reality. This dance can only last so long.Only for values of 'all' that exclude well-connected members of the billionaire class and their select associates.

[AI drug discovery] was never the hard part.

How refreshing was this article vs. all the slop?The lack of comparable data and testability really does seem to be a challenge. I wonder if people would be more willing to collect and share lots of health data if the collecting company was a non-profit dedicated to anonymizing it.

nerd-fanboi proposal: Articles by national treasures (like Derek Lowe, Raymond Chen) should be highlighted with specific identifiers on HN - like a distinctive title font or an ascii diamond ◊. reply: No thanks. Social media needs less hero worship. Just RSS whoever you like.

need one for brain plasicity. it would be nice to be able to easily learn a foreign language or musical instrument naturally. reply: Easily? Have you ever actually learned a second language or an instrument as a child?

> "The paper goes on to make recommendations for AI companies and investigators, and these are well worth reading. The common theme is that people need to think more about why they’re doing certain techniques or using certain technologies, rather than just using them because they’re newly available."Please. Please let some people with power and influence understand this lesson sooner rather than later. I understand the reasons that's unlikely to occur, but usually the impact isn't quite so drastic and expensive as this is. Just because something is new and shiny doesn't mean that it'll produce the outcomes you need at the other end, and until it's shown that capability your approach to it should be MODERATE. reply: Drug discovery scientists think about what they're doing and why ALL THE TIME. AI stuff is just another tool.It's also worth mentioning that drug development timelines typically exceed the interval in which these technologies have been available (or at least effective). Measuring impact will take a long time.

Has this yet produced a treatment for AI psychosis?No? Well fancy that! :)