A Drug Used to Cost Ten Years and Two Billion. But AI Is Changing the Math
A new drug, from the first idea to the day you find it on a pharmacy shelf, used to take ten years and over two billion euros. We take it for granted. That’s how it’s always worked.
Now seventy-five Italian scientific societies, the ones representing hospital and university doctors, line up two numbers. Artificial intelligence cuts the cost of developing a drug by twenty-five percent.
As some of you know, I hold a chair in cyberhumanities inside the medicine and surgery program at San Raffaele in Milan. Living here in New York I teach most of it remotely, but the upside is that I also get to work with the scientific community here in the US.
And here in the United States the labs working with AI don’t use it to replace researchers. They use it to read millions of molecules in a few days, throw out the ones that don’t work and predict which ones are worth actually testing. The work that used to be years of trial and error now starts already filtered.
But those ten years weren’t all wasted.
Part of it is research, and that AI speeds up. Another part is the clinical trials, real people you give the drug to see if it’s safe. And that part is there to protect us. If we fall in love with faster and cheaper and cut there too, the risk is paid by whoever takes the pill.
And if developing a drug costs twenty-five percent less, does that drug reach us any cheaper?
We just have to remember that speed is good only as long as we don’t pay for it with safety, and as long as we see that saving too.
What do you think?
#ArtificialDecisions #MCC #ArtificialIntelligence #DrugDiscovery #Healthcare
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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H34WH3BV
🔍 SEE ALSO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltaEzoIaa88