AI Drug Discovery & What It Means For Pharmacists
The Pursuit of Novel Drugs
The pursuit of new drug discovery has always been an expensive, complex, and time-consuming endeavor, often taking many years, lots of intellectual capital, and billions of dollars to bring a new drug to clinical trials. However, that timeline is expected to be drastically shortened. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) platforms like AlphaFold are poised to revolutionize this process, making it faster, more efficient, and more successful. This advancement, while exciting for patients and providers alike, will have significant implications for pharmacists, who will need to adapt to new, more complex treatments and stay current with evolving therapies. Thus, pharmacy managers and hospital leaders must find ways to free up time for pharmacy providers to self-educate, manage, and assist patients in navigating an increased wave of novel treatments.
Generative AI in Drug Discovery
Generative AI in drug discovery refers to a subset of artificial intelligence platforms that focus on using existing data to predict how cells will react to a mind-numbing number of manipulations.
In the not too distant past, the aforementioned AlphaFold 1 achieved first place in the 2018 CASP competition by accurately predicting difficult protein structures without existing templates. Then in 2020, AlphaFold 2 repeated this success, achieving unprecedented accuracy, scoring above 90 on the global distance test for two-thirds of the proteins. The AlphaFold 2 paper, published in Nature in 2021, has been widely lauded and cited nearly 32,000 times.
Essentially, these advanced algorithms and machine learning techniques, which won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, are used to design new molecular structures, predict how proteins will fold, simulate drug interactions, and optimize drug candidates.
With that said, traditional methods of novel drug discovery have often involved laborious trial-and-error experiments, but generative AI models, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs), can analyze large chemical datasets and create compounds with specific traits, such as strong binding affinity and low toxicity.
Generative AI also enhances virtual screening, a critical step in drug discovery that involves evaluating vast chemical libraries to identify potential active compounds. By predicting how different molecules interact with specific biological targets, these generative AI models can focus on compounds that are most likely to succeed while also revealing new treatment applications for existing conditions.
This also paves a path forward for a new wave of personalized medicine, which aims to tailor treatments based on individual patient characteristics. Through analyzing patient data, such as genetic profiles, generative AI models can design drugs that are more tailored for each person.
Impact On Pharmacists
As generative AI continues to accelerate drug discovery, pharmacists will face new challenges in staying current, managing, and dispensing these more complex treatments. The increased availability of these sophisticated new drugs will require pharmacists to spend more time understanding and explaining these treatments to patients, ensuring proper use for the sake of patient safety. This shift in focus will necessitate that pharmacists have more time to dedicate to patient care.
One of the key ways to achieve this desired flexibility is to automate mundane and repeatable tasks within the pharmacy workflow. Pharmacy automation technology, when used to streamline pharmacy operations, such as medication dispensing, inventory management, and data analysis, can create an opportunity for pharmacists to provide this critical guidance.
Pharmaceuticals Going Forward
In short, the integration of generative AI in drug discovery is set to transform the pharmaceutical industry, leading to the development of more complex and personalized treatments. As a result, pharmacists will need to adapt to these advancements and find ways to free up time to assist patients in navigating these new treatments. Pharmacy automation offers a promising solution by streamlining routine tasks, improving accuracy, and enhancing efficiency, allowing pharmacists to focus on what they do best—providing high-quality patient care.
By embracing both generative AI and pharmacy automation, the major health institutions can ensure that pharmacists are well-equipped to handle the challenges of modern drug discovery and continue to play a vital role in patient care.
