Machine Intervention: Psychedelics, Artificial Intelligence, and the Drug Discovery Process (PSR)

Psychedelic Science Review (PSR) published an article in January 2020, providing “a look into the promising potential of artificial intelligence in tackling unmet medical needs in mental healthcare.”

More importantly, perhaps, the article digs into how the drug discovery process has—or, perhaps, had, based on these new innovations—stagnated.

One one hand, the cost of drug discovery has significantly increased, according to an article in Scientific American.

On the other, there are three factors affecting the process itself that, together, have given rise to a phenomenon called Eroom’s Law:

• Competition from an ever-improving back catalog of approved medicines, increasing the complexity of the development process for new drugs

• The gradual lowering of the risk tolerance of drug regulatory agencies such as the FDA and EMA

• And the factor most relevant to this article, the reliance on basic research and brute force methods

Despite these issues, the article contents, there is hope. “The recent application of machine learning algorithms to the drug development process may bring some order to the chaos.”

Check out the article in its entirety, and please feel free to contact us with any questions.