Deborah Lambie: Milford Asset Management analyst on the role AI plays in the discovery of new medicines

New developments in the world of AI could make the discovery of medicines faster and cheaper for consumers.

It's been found generative AI can be taught to process and examine new molecules - with the potential to unveil new treatments.

Milford Asset Management's Deborah Lambie explains the benefits of these new developments.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Let's go first to build for asset management. Debra Lambie
of course, high Debra, Hi, how are you well? Thank you?
So how is AI being used to discover new medicines?
So it's interesting. I'm just recently back from a US
trip where I visited over forty different global healthcare companies,
and one of the things that really stuck out to
me was actually just how excited companies and investors are

(00:21):
about the potential of AI to transform the drug discovery process.
And that's the process that identifies new molecules that have
the potential to be used as a medicine. So artificial
intelligence models that you or I might use, these are
trained on language and generate a language output, and a
good example of this would be chat GPT, But then
there's also drug GPT, and this is an example of

(00:44):
an AI model which has trained on huge data sets
of known molecules and its output is to help discover
new molecules. And then this is really exciting because it
has the potential to make the drug discovery process much
faster and cheaper. Yeah, what is it that the traditional
drug discovery process is so time consuming and expensive? Exactly,
So for a medicine to be approved for use in patients.

(01:08):
All medicines have to go to the time triming and
expensive process of completing phase one, phase two, and place
three clinical trials to demonstrate that a medicine is both
safe and importantly effective in people. And this cost on
average over two billion dollars per new molecule and takes
on average around ten years. And then the success rate
isn't great either, with many medicines not making it all

(01:29):
the way through the process and in fact, on average
only around seven percent of molecules make it all the
way through from phase one clinical trials to approval. And
so if artificial intelligence can help bring the cost of
drug discovery down, that can only be a good things
that make governments and healthcare systems all around the world,
including here in New Zealans, are dealing with increasing costs

(01:50):
of healthcare. So right, yeah, how is it actually doing it?
How does AI bring down the cost and the time
of developing these new medicines. So it's really complicated to
design new molecules, and what we're seeing is that artificial
intelligence can go to the design process of new molecules
approximately ten times faster, and then it can run simulations
or testing on those molecules about one hundred times faster

(02:13):
compared to traditional labs, and this reduces the time and
the cost involved in developing new medicines. And so if
we think about how companies are doing this, you will
heard of the concept of self driving cars. Then in
the world of farmer there's also the concept of self
driving labs. So these labs are using artificial intelligence and
robotics combined to run a cycle of prediction of new molecules,

(02:36):
experimentation on those new molecules, and then analysis of those
molecules to identify most promising compounds that are then tested
in the real world. Who are the companies the main
companies who are involved here, So a good example another
company that helps with self driving labs so US company
called Betton Dickinson and it's leader in lab automation systems

(02:56):
and its technology can take out around a third of
the cost of the traditional lab. And then on the
drug discovery side, what we're seeing is a number of
AI focused companies of partnering with big pharmaceutical companies. So
for example, there's a UKAI company called Benevolent Ai and
it's partners with Astra Zeneca, which is a large farmer company,

(03:16):
and Astra Zenker is using its platform to find new
ways to treat disease and personalized medicine insipation. Debraah, the
stuff is absolutely fascinating, isn't it. Thank you so much
for talking us through this. Deborah Landy Milfed Asset Management.
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