The next blockbuster drug could be invented by artificial intelligence.

Medicines designed by artificial intelligence for conditions including lymph cancers, inflammatory diseases and motor neuron diseases are reaching trials in humans, reports POLITICO’s Ashleigh Furlong.

It comes as AI advancements accelerate and the Food and Drug Administration ponders what role it should have, if any, in regulating the nascent technology.

If successful, AI promises nothing less than a revolution for the pharmaceutical industry: It could dramatically reduce the time it takes to develop a new medicine, as well as help identify new drug molecules that have so far eluded scientists.

The premise for using AI in drug discovery and development is straightforward: Use algorithms to trawl through vast troves of data — including the structures of chemical compounds, animal studies and information from patients — to help identify what a future drug needs to target in the human body; which molecule would be best suited to do it; and most enticing, how to create new molecules altogether.

“I absolutely do believe that all drugs will be designed this way in the future,” said Andrew Hopkins, the founder of drug company Exscientia, which has a cancer drug and one for inflammatory diseases in clinical trials.

Other drugmakers are working on AI-designed medicine:

— Schrödinger has a potential lymphoma drug in clinical trials.

— Insilico has a drug to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a serious disease that causes scarring of the lungs, that’s expected to enter Phase II trials this year.

— Verge Genomics is trialing a novel therapeutic for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

In some cases, such as with Verge’s ALS drug, the drug development process itself has been thrown on its head. Traditionally, drugs are tested in animals before moving to humans.

Instead, Verge’s platform uses human data and human models in the discovery and development phase, a process that it believes provides more insightful findings than animal models.

Hurdles remain: AI-designed drugs require massive amounts of validated data, and that’s often lacking, said Andrea Beccari, who heads up drug company Dompé’s research efforts.

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Today on our Pulse Check podcast, host Katherine Ellen Foley talks with Erin about Sen. Marco Rubio’s bill to make daylight saving time permanent, which he’s revived after it stalled in the House last year. Erin discusses past efforts to make daylight saving time permanent and why many scientists oppose the idea.

Congress wants the public to have a look at all the intelligence on Covid-19’s origins so Americans can judge it for themselves.

On Friday, the House followed the Senate in unanimously passing a bill by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) to require the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to submit an unclassified report to Congress “with redactions only as necessary to protect sources and methods.”

But it may not solve the mystery around how Covid came to be, says Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.).

He told colleagues during the floor debate that, in his role as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, he’s seen all the classified documents.

The bottom line: “We don’t know the origins of the Covid pandemic,” Himes said.

That’s reflected in the varied opinions of U.S. agencies.

The National Intelligence Council, which provides policymakers with coordinated assessments of all federal intelligence agencies, says it thinks — with low confidence — that an animal transmitted the virus to humans. Four other agencies reportedly share that view but haven’t stated so publicly, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The FBI believes with moderate confidence that the virus escaped China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, while the Journal reported the Department of Energy has reviewed new evidence, prompting it to say a lab leak is the most likely cause of the pandemic, albeit with low confidence.

If Biden signs the bill, the public could see what the DOE saw.

That alone would be a victory, said House Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and colleagues on her panel in a statement: “Congress has sent a clear message that it’s critical to provide full transparency.”

Some workers fear machines will replace them.

But a new report from consulting firm Accenture puts a positive spin on automation in the health care industry, arguing it could be a burnout cure.

About a third of health care workers’ tasks could be automated, according to Accenture, and 38 percent of tasks could be augmented by tech.

That means 70 percent of medical tasks could be “reinvented” with tech, the consultancy found.

Rich Birhanzel, Accenture senior managing director and global health lead, suggested some possibilities in an interview with Ben:

— Ambient listening technology could gather information from patient encounters.

— Virtual humans in the metaverse could replace real-life health care trainers.

— Patients could get physical therapy in cyberspace without a physical therapist present.

— Tech could be more involved in taking measurements like blood pressure.

Birhanzel believes this will be good for workers, allowing them to spend less time on administrative tasks and more on clinical ones.

“The concept is that we’re freeing up these valuable clinical resources to spend time with patients,” Birhanzel said. “We’re just getting more value out of those really precious resources.”