Paul Denny-Gouldson, VP Strategic Solutions at IDBS, explores what the future holds for drug discovery laboratories.
A team of researchers at the University of Manchester this month published promising findings on 'Eve' – an artificially-intelligent ‘robot scientist’ capable of screening potential drugs almost completely independently. Eve has discovered a compound shown to have anti-cancer properties, which might also be useful in the fight against malaria. Meanwhile, IBM’s artificially intelligent (AI) Watson system is seeing take-up among pharmaceutical companies. Is this how we can expect the lab of the future to materialise?