AI for drug discovery draws a $1 billion launch—and a lot of hope

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI.

The pursuit to use AI to discover new life-saving drugs got a big boost this week when a new company, Xaira Therapeutics, emerged from stealth with $1 billion in funding. The San Francisco-based firm aims to create AI models to develop new ways to connect biological targets and engineered molecules to human diseases. It’s led by Genentech’s former chief scientific officer and was incubated by Foresite Labs and Arch Venture Partners—the latter of which says Xaira is the largest initial funding commitment the firm has ever made in its 30 years of investing.

Any funding round with a B—especially for an early-stage company—represents a big bet and a lot of hope. Aspirations are particularly high for the use of AI in drug discovery. While the upside of models that can create videos, music, and other creative works is still fuzzy (and in some ways even feel threatening), the societal benefits of breakthroughs in medicine that could help people live longer, healthier lives, and reduce suffering are crystal clear. It’s one of the use cases for AI I’ve been most interested in for this reason. Even my grandmother, who within the last year or so started hearing about AI on shows like “60 Minutes,” tells me that while she’s very worried about AI, she’s hopeful for what it could do to advance medical research and help people with conditions like Dementia.

These pursuits are still in their very early days, but there are efforts underway, deals being made, and some signs of success. Data analysis firm StartUs Insights identified 463 AI startups working on drug discovery. Pharmaceutical behemoths are also pouring money into AI drug development efforts—just yesterday, Moderna announced a partnership with OpenAI to further incorporate AI into its drug discovery and development processes. Last year, BioNTech and Eli Lilly acquired AI drug discovery startups InstaDeep ($680 million) and XtalPi ($250 million), respectively. Big Tech is also diving in. Microsoft has partnered with Novo Nordisk and Google has released AI tools aimed specifically at helping pharmaceutical and biotech firms advance drug discovery and development. Last month also saw the first AI-targeted and AI-designed drug reach Phase II clinical trials—a drug developed by startup Insilico Medicine to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

How AI can bolster drug discovery was also a hot topic at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conferences in San Francisco late last year and last week in London. During a breakout session focused on AI’s role in drug discovery and clinical trials at the San Francisco conference, Amgen VP of digital, technology, and innovation Skott Skeller said this is a “hinge moment” for the biopharmaceutical industry that’s changing how drugs are developed.

“I often think, and someone once told me, that discovery and bringing drugs to market is all around identifying the cause of biology, poring over the chemistry, and then innovating like crazy to get that therapy to patients,” added Rory Kelleher, Nvidia’s global head of life sciences business development. “Think about it—AI can be implemented at every stage of that pipeline. And so we’re thinking about, how do we democratize those capabilities so that we can decrease the failure rate? If you decrease the failure rate, you reduce the cost and time it takes to market. And there are thousands of diseases with unmet needs.”

At this point, it’s important to note that AI isn’t a total silver bullet for drug discovery. While AI can drastically speed up finding promising compounds to make drugs, a lot of time-consuming and expensive steps of the process will still be required. For example, drugs will still need to be tested in wet labs—where they’re analyzed using physical samples—go through clinical trials, and gain FDA approvals. Still, AI has the potential to massively streamline that first step and make it possible to find targets that might not have been discovered otherwise.

AI’s potential for health care doesn’t stop at drug discovery, however. Researchers are also examining how AI can bolster health care-focused robotics, analyze data to help make the best decisions for a patient’s care, aid in preventative health, and so many more facets of health care. As covered in Tuesday’s Eye on AI, startup Profluent AI this week demonstrated the first successful precision editing of the human genome with a programmable gene editor designed using AI. AI is also already being used widely in diagnosis, where multiple studies have shown it performs faster and more accurately than humans. One AI program for detecting breast cancer reliably interprets patient data 30 times faster than a human doctor and with 99% accuracy.

And with that, here’s more AI news.

Sage Lazzaro
sage.lazzaro@consultant.fortune.com
sagelazzaro.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com