How Artificial Intelligence Will Change Medicine
Right now the biggest bets are being placed in the realm of drug discovery. And for good reason. The average cost of bringing a new drug to market nearly doubled between 2003 and 2013 to $2.6 billion, and because nine out of 10 fail in the final two phases of clinical trials, most of the money goes to waste.
Every large pharma company is working with at least one AI-focused start-up to see if it can raise the return on investment. Machine-learning algorithms can sift through millions of compounds, narrowing the options for a particular drug target. Perhaps more exciting, AI systems—unconstrained by prevailing theories and biases—can identify entirely new targets by spotting subtle differences at the level of tissues, cells, genes or proteins between, say, a healthy brain and one marked by Parkinson’s—differences that might elude or even mystify a human scientist.