The Dose in the Machine

IS A NEW GENERATION OF AI-DESIGNED DRUGS ABOUT TO ARRIVE?

- BY Veronique Greenwood PHOTOGRAPHS BY Balarama Heller

A new drug usually starts with a tragedy.

Peter Ray knows that. Born in what is now Zimbabwe, the child of a mechanic and a radiology technician, Ray fled with his family to South Africa during the Zimbabwean War of Liberation. He remembers the journey there in 1980 in a convoy of armored cars. As the sun blazed down, a soldier taught 8-year-old Ray how to fire a machine gun. But his mother kept having to stop. She didn't feel well.

Doctors in Cape Town diagnosed her with cancer. Ray remembers going to her radiation treatments with her, the hospital rooms, the colostomy bags. She loved the beach, loved to walk along the line where the water met the land. But it got harder for her to go. Sometimes she came home from the hospital for a while and it seemed like things would get better. Ray got his hopes up. Then things would fall apart again. Surgery, radiation, chemotherapy—the treatments that were on the table in the 1980s—were soon exhausted. As she lay dying, he promised her he was going to make a difference, somehow. He was 13 years old.

Ray studied to become a medicinal chemist, first in South Africa, taking out loans to fund his studies, then at the University of Liverpool. He worked at drug companies across the UK, on numerous projects. Now, at 53, he is one of the lead drug designers at a pharmaceutical company called Recursion. He thinks about that promise to his mom a lot. “It’s lived with me my whole life,” he says. “I need to get drugs on the market that impact cancer.”