Drug discovery is infamously brutal. More than 90% of drug candidates fail before ever reaching patients. Artificial intelligence (AI) dangles a tantalizing possibility: a faster, cheaper way through that potential valley of death. By rapidly screening millions of molecules, predicting which might work, and flagging problems early, AI could help scientists avoid years of painful trial and error. Though no AI-designed drug has so far made it all the way to market, two AI-assisted candidates have already cleared phase 2 clinical trials, proving safe in patients.

Science spoke with intellectual property (IP) lawyers Fredrick Tsang and Antonia Sequeira of Fenwick & West about who owns AI-assisted inventions and why accidentally overstating AI’s contribution could backfire. One of the lawyers' answers: "… when AI outputs a digital form of a molecule, that does not mean that it knows there will be a way to make it. I think there’s still a high chance that the synthetic chemist who comes up with the actual way to make that molecule could still be the inventor. Because of that, the [chemist’s] company will still continue to own the IP of the molecule."
 

Source https://www.science.org/content/article/if-ai-discovers-drug-who-gets-money

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