Where Are All the AI Drugs?

A new drug usually begins with a tragedy.

Peter Ray knows it. Zimbabwe, who is now a child of Zimbabwe, a mechanic and a radiological technique, fled to South Africa with the Ray family. In 1980, he remembers his journey in a caravan of armored vehicles. As the sun sank, a soldier taught how to fire a machine gun in a 8-year-old ray. But his mother continued to stop. It didn’t feel good.

Doctors in Cape Town diagnosed it cancer. Ray, along with him, went to radiation treatments, hospital rooms and colostomy bags. He loved the beach, loved to walk along the line where the water was located. But it was more difficult to go. Sometimes it seemed to be home from the hospital for a while and seemed to be. Ray increased their hopes. Then the work would be separated again. Surgery, radiation, chemotherapy – treatment in the table in the 1980s, soon run out. As killed, he promised to somehow intend to make a change. He was 13 years old.

In the first Africa, first learned to be a drug chemist in South Africa, then received loans for financing at Liverpool University. Worked Drug companies Throughout the UK, over numerous projects. Now in 53, he is one of the leading drug designers in a pharmaceutical company called Recursion. This promise is about a lot about this promise. “It lived with me all my life,” he says. “I have to buy drugs in the market that affects cancer.”

The desire to prevent anyone else in their own tragedies can be a strong motivator. But the process case-exploration He was always sad, and it was slowly slow. First, chemist As the Ray Zero, targets are usually twisted and folded in a protein, a long amino acids. They call a model on computer screens and are in black space. They are teasing the curves and ads on the surface, as a spaceship, a molecule, as a spaceship, can do. Then they are trying to build an atom, the spaceship.

When the new molecule is ready, chemists go through it together biologiststhose who tested in live cells in hot rooms. More tragedies: There are always many cells die for reasons not always clear. Biology is complicated and new drugs do not work as expected. Chemists will have to create another, the other, pinch, regulation, often for years. A biologist, keith mikulu The medication of theirsilicoHe spoke of his experience in a different drug company. After five years of work, the best molecule unexpected, dangerous side effects, they could not get it further, he said. “There was a great team of great chemists, a great biologist, thousands of molecules, and there is no real progress,” he said.

If a team is very lucky, it makes the most likely things in mice. Her healthy human volunteers get a chance to give a small group with a phase test. If volunteers remain healthy, then, including the disease, including people in the II stage. If people do not receive sick, they get a chance-phase – as possible to people as many as possible people, as possible as possible.

At each stage, the reasons can understand less people and less predict, the drugs have large rafts. More than 90 percent of hopeful people fail along the way. When you respond to drug hunters, you can ask them that if they always took a drug, thin, delicate. “It is very rare,” says a medicine (niraparib, for ovarian cancer), Mikul. “We are Unicornik”.