Automation is a growing phenomenon within
many areas of scientific development
especially within the area of research
and development of new medicines.
Diseases like malaria and other tropical diseases infect millions
of people across the world annually. The pharmaceutical industry
is constantly striving to create new drugs to combat
and treat these diseases because of the research timescales
and costs involved it’s an increasingly difficult challenge and
therefore improving the speed of the drug
recovery process is of paramount importance.
At The University of Manchester, a team of scientists has
developed EVE, a scientist robot.
EVE uses Artificial Intelligence to identify, sort and separate the
compounds which can then help researchers narrow down new drug candidates faster.
Artificial intelligence that robots like EVE possess ensures that
the speed at which they can process formulae and combinations is
much faster than the speed at which a human brain can function.
Also, EVE and similar robot scientists are not prone to fatigue like
human scientific brains. The early-stage of drug design has been automated
and EVE’s robotic system can screen more than ten
thousand compounds in a day, every day.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge think that the subsequent
versions of EVE can not only discover, but also synthesise new drug compounds.
Robot scientists like EVE have now made it possible to believe that robotic
scientists can not only conduct experiments, but also study the results,
analyse them and explain the research findings at greater speeds and
accuracy as compared to human brains, thus providing a much needed
boost to hypothesis-led automated research.