FDA Approval for AI-Designed Drugs Probably Isn’t That Far Away

Trying to get medicine approved by the US Food and Drug Administration often feels like buying an expensive lottery ticket, with the uncertain prospect of a reward years away. It takes about a decade and more than $1 billion on average to take a drug through all the stages of clinical trials, and about 90% never get that far.

Part of the problem is the way researchers discover treatments. Until recently, scientists would come up with a hypothesis and run numerous tests to find a chemical capable of shutting down, say, a disease-causing protein. Then they’d run additional tests to ...