AI Has Reinvented Drug Discovery. Now Come the Borders
AI can now design a drug that works in humans. The hard part is that the world just decided to stop sharing.
For roughly a hundred years, the way humanity found new medicines was, in the polite language of the industry, empirical. In less polite language: guessing at scale.
The ritual went like this. Identify a protein that seems to be doing something terrible inside a sick person. Build a library of a few million chemical compounds. Squirt them, one by one, into tiny wells on a plastic plate. Watch for the flicker of a compound that sticks. Then spend a decade and a couple billion dollars finding out whether that sticky little molecule kills the disease, the patient, or neither.
It worked. Statins, antiretrovirals, the checkpoint inhibitors that turned certain death sentences into chronic conditions — all of it came out of that grinding, expensive, luck-dependent machine. But...
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