The AI-planned new recipes—for 11 medicines so far—could help manufacturers produce medications whose syntheses are tightly held trade secrets. And because the new methods use cheap, readily available starting materials, licensed drug suppliers could quickly ramp up production of any promising therapies.
“If you are going to supply a drug to the world, your starting materials have to be cheap and as available as sugar,” says Danielle Schultz, a chemist at Merck. The new method, posted as a preprint this week, “is really solid,” she says. “I am impressed by the speed at which [the researchers] were able to find new solutions for making existing drugs.”
