Artificial intelligence in drug discovery: what is realistic, what are illusions? Part 1: Ways to make an impact, and why we are not there yet

Although artificial intelligence (AI) has had a profound impact on areas such as image recognition, comparable advances in drug discovery are rare. This article quantifies the stages of drug discovery in which improvements in the time taken, success rate or affordability will have the most profound overall impact on bringing new drugs to market. Changes in clinical success rates will have the most profound impact on improving success in drug discovery; in other words, the quality of decisions regarding which compound to take forward (and how to conduct clinical trials) are more important than speed or cost. Although current advances in AI focus on how to make a given compound, the question of which compound to make, using clinical efficacy and safety-related end points, has received significantly less attention. As a consequence, current proxy measures and available data cannot fully utilize the potential of AI in drug discovery, in particular when it comes to drug efficacy and safety in vivo. Thus, addressing the questions of which data to generate and which end points to model will be key to improving clinically relevant decision-making in the future.