A Canadian team used AI to make a cancer drug. Is this a game-changer?

In today’s Big Story podcast, it’s a process that can take up to a decade. And individual aspects of it can take up to a year or more. Or … it can take, like, a month.

The drug development process is time-consuming, intense and very, very expensive. So much so that only huge pharmaceutical companies can afford to keep swinging and missing. But a Canadian team using AI programs is aiming to change that — everything from the length of time to who can afford to do the work, and it just might revolutionize the entire process.

Alán Aspuru-Guzik is on that team. He’s a professor of Chemistry and Computer Science at the University of Toronto and director of the Acceleration Consortium.

“What we set out to do is to continue showing that AI is very powerful at making discoveries that could lead to therapeutics or new materials faster than if you didn’t use AI,” he said on The Big Story podcast.

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