The field of peptides is exploding, Perpetual Medicines Corp. co-founder, chairman and CEO Kerry L. Blanchard recently told BioWorld, “with a projected growth rate far surpassing large and small molecules, and gene therapies. The area is underinvested, too, so this is a good opportunity to focus on peptide therapeutics.”

If we unraveled the DNA of the 46 chromosomes of a single human cell, it would barely measure 2 meters. If we did the same with the rest of the body, if we aligned the 3 billion base pairs of its 5 trillion cells, we could travel the distance from the Earth to the Sun more than 100 times. It seems unreachable. However, that is the unit of knowledge of the large sequencing projects achieved in 2023. From the generation of the human pangenome to cell-by-cell maps of the brain and kidneys, scientists this year have completed several omics collaborative projects stored in large international databases. Now, what’s the plan?

Researchers have used explainable artificial intelligence (explainable AI) to find structurally new antibiotics with minimal toxicity. They reported their findings online in Nature on Dec. 20, 2023. In animal testing, compounds identified via the method showed that they had activity against drug-resistant gram-positive bacteria including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), one of the most serious bacterial public health threats.

Artificial intelligence has morphed from a buzzword referencing a popular curiosity to a series of national security and competitiveness considerations, which was reflected in the tone of a recent hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives.

A number of recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have sent some reassurance that these algorithms will not hit the market completely devoid of regulation, but a Nov. 8 hearing in the U.S. Senate makes clear that Capitol Hill is intent on legislating on AI, even if only belatedly.

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to entice. On the exhibition floor at the 2023 Congress of the European Academy of Neurology, one company’s booth featured “Mindart” technology. A passersby could answer a short series of prompts, and get a unique image based on the input made by generative AI. Entertainment aside, medically speaking, AI applications “are still research,” Riccardo Soffietti told his audience at one of several sessions devoted to AI. “But obviously, research is the future.”

Integrated Biosciences Inc., an early-stage startup that is combining synthetic biology and machine learning in the hunt for drugs that tackle cell senescence, has demonstrated its capabilities in a newly published study in Nature Aging on May 4, 2023, which employed artificial intelligence to identify three novel compounds that are highly selective for Bcl-2 and that exhibit favorable medicinal chemistry profiles.

It is now possible to look up the 3D structure of every known protein following the latest release of Alphafold, an open database run in partnership by Deepmind, the London-based artificial intelligence company owned by Google parent Alphabet and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, U.K.

The question of whether an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm can be an inventor has been making the rounds in the past couple of years, and the question came up again in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Stephen Thaler, who developed the Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS) algorithm that has been credited with two inventions, failed to persuade the court that an algorithm qualifies as an “individual,” and thus patents must still be assigned to humans, at least where the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is concerned.