Drug development is expensive, time consuming, and risky. A typical new drug costs billions of dollars to develop and requires more than ten years of work — yet only about 0.02% of the drugs in development ever making it to market.
Some claim that AI, or artificial intelligence, will revolutionize drug development by ushering in much shorter development times and drastically lower costs. Many scientists and business consultants are especially optimistic about AI's ability to predict the shapes of nearly every known protein using DeepMind's AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence tool developed by Google parent company Alphabet; predicting this information with great detail would be key to quickly developing drugs. As one AI company boasts, "We … firmly believe that AI has the potential to transform the drug discovery process to achieve time and cost efficiencies."
