The Better The AI Gets, The Harder It Is To Ignore

Hong Kong based Insilico Medicine, a pioneer in AI-based drug discovery, has made significant strides in recent years. Two of their candidates have reached clinical trials, with INS018-055 leading the pack as the first AI-discovered drug designed by generative AI to enter phase 2 clinical trials for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). Back in 2014, when the company began, AI for drug discovery was relatively unheard of, but now it’s an indispensable part of the drug discovery process. Insilico’s partnerships with major pharmaceutical firms like Janssen underscore the growing importance of AI in this field. Dr Alex Zhavoronkov, Founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, sheds light on the industry’s evolving response to AI in drug discovery, partnerships, regulatory reforms etc. and also shares the company’s future plans. Edited excerpts:

- Ayesha Siddiqui

Insilico Medicine has garnered attention for its innovative utilisation of artificial intelligence (AI) in drug discovery. Could you provide insights into how the industry’s response to AI-based drug discovery has evolved since your inception in 2014?

In the early days, when I presented at conferences on how generative AI technology could be applied to chemistry, there was a lot of scepticism. I had discovered through my research that generative adversarial networks (GANs) combined with deep reinforcement learning (the same AI learning strategy used in AlphaGo) could generate novel molecules that could be used to treat disease. Since that time, AI drug discovery has undergone enormous acceleration, fueled both by advances in AI technology and in massive stores of data. While there are still no AI-designed drugs on the market, there are a number of companies with these drugs in advanced clinical trials, including our own lead drug for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, the drug with an AI-discovered target and designed by generative AI now in Phase II trials with patients. Although the pharma industry has moved cautiously, the inherent risks in drug discovery (99 per cent of the drugs fail in the early discovery phase and 90 per cent of the drugs fail in clinical trials) and the validation of AI developed drugs to reach advanced trials, means that pharma companies are more actively pursuing partnerships and developing their own internal AI programmes. We have major partnerships with Exelixis, Sanofi and Fosun Pharma to develop new therapies, for instance.