DeepMind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis, told Bloomberg that artificial intelligence will radically accelerate the process of drug discovery, which has long plagued the pharmaceutical industry with its slow and costly dynamics. If the promises hold true, drug development could shrink from over a decade to just a few months.
At the center of this approach are AlphaFold and its spin-off company, Isomorphic Labs, which use AI to predict protein structures and speed up the creation of targeted drugs. These tools significantly reduce failure rates and research costs by modeling molecular interactions more accurately and much faster than teams of human researchers.
The latest version, AlphaFold 3, goes a step further—analyzing dynamic protein interactions, opening the door for drug designs that are far more precise than anything previously possible. According to early announcements, Isomorphic Labs expects the first AI-designed drugs to enter clinical trials as early as this year.
For an industry currently facing staggering statistics—where 90% of drugs fail in trials, each successful drug costs an average of more than $2 billion, and development takes 10 to 15 years—AI could represent a complete turning point. If the technology lives up to expectations, it could pave the way for more sustainable disease research and turn personalized medicine from a distant dream into a practical reality.
In brief: Tech World Highlights
- YouTube and Fox are stuck in a contract dispute that could block streaming of key NFL and college football games for subscribers this season.
- Trump confirmed he may extend the deadline for ByteDance to sell its U.S. TikTok assets, just days after his administration launched its own TikTok account.
- Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) created “cyborg” jellyfish that can be steered using tiny microelectronic devices to collect data from hard-to-reach deep ocean areas.
- Archer Aviation’s electric vertical aircraft, Midnight eVTOL, just completed a record 55-mile flight in 31 minutes, reaching speeds of 126 mph (about 203 km/h).
- A German court ordered Apple to stop advertising its smartwatches as “carbon neutral,” ruling the claim as greenwashing.
AI Trending Tools:
- NEO – A new state-of-the-art autonomous machine learning engineer by Neo AI.
- FLUX.1 Krea [dev] – An advanced open-source image generation model, developed by BFL and Krea.
- AlphaEarth Foundations – Google’s AI model for generating maps on demand.
