How AI Could Prevent the Development of New Illicit Drugs

December 29, 2021

(Undark) – To help streamline the work, Wishart and his colleagues used a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning to create an algorithm that identifies potential designer drugs that may not yet even exist. The millions of chemicals identified by the algorithm — dubbed DarkNPS — could help governments stay one step ahead of their production, says Wishart. He and a team of other researchers published the work in Nature Machine Intelligence in November. Wishart says that the algorithm could help law enforcement and forensic chemists identify novel psychoactive substances — a process that could otherwise take up to several months. DarkNPS may also highlight beneficial new compounds for clinical use. And, according to Wishart, there is another advantage: Governments could go through the cache of hypothetical drugs DarkNPS developed and ban them, even before anyone actually produces or distributes them.  (Read More)