Question 4:

“We overestimate the impact of technology in the short-term and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Do you think this statement would apply to AI driven drug discovery?

Answer:

I think this happens with many new technologies and discoveries and I think this is happening with AI-based drug discovery. However, the potential is huge and has the potential to make important contributions in the short-term. Indeed, as you alluded to earlier, the dramatic recent advances in AI-driven protein structure prediction provide unprecedented opportunities and will make this is an exciting time for biology, medicine and drug discovery.

Question 7:

As far as you know, in what extent biologists and medical experts appreciate the assistance of AI in their research? How could biomedical science direct and enable the next phases of AI development? In other words, what types of feedback from the medical science community would be valuable to AI scientists in the coming years?

Answer:

I personally think that AI/machine learning can have transformative impacts on biological and medical research. I suspect it is underutilized at the moment and we all need to learn how to spot the opportunities. A risk is that AI-based centres are established where the links between the computational people and laboratory or clinical scientists are not as strong as they could be. Similarly, the initiatives and questions that need to be solved are often best identified by the experimental scientists and clinicians and not the computational experts. Thus, we need to seek to integrate the computational work much better within the experimental and clinical frameworks and in many cases designs