More and more people are starting to decry the lack of progress from AI-driven companies that promised large numbers of drugs would come to market by now. And what they've produced is neither novel nor performing well in clinical trials.

The largest players in the space have seen several drug candidates shelved or dropped by their partners as their drugs either fail in trials or return otherwise lackluster data. At least one of these companies hasn't generated drug candidates using AI; they simply outlicensed drug candidates made the old-fashioned way in university labs.

Nothing New

In my recent discussion with Verseon's CEO Adityo Prakash, I learned that the seeds of failure for the cur-rent crop of AI drug-discovery companies can be seen in their patent filings. Examining their so-called "new" drugs' structures when compared to older drugs makes one wonder about what passes for AI driven innovation:

The End of the Line for Some…

We're now seeing the start of a major shakeout in the AI-driven drug discovery space.

BenevolentAI's stock has taken a pummeling over the past year or so, and they've had major layoffs. Ex-scientia's days as an independent company recently ended when Recursion purchased them for $688 million – a fraction of their $2.9 billion market cap at IPO.