https://www.technologyreview.

com/2020/08/28/1007737/ibm-ai-robot-drug-making-lab-in-the-
cloud/

Hao, K. (2020, August 28). IBM has built a new drug-making lab entirely in the cloud.
Retrieved August 31, 2020, from
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/28/1007737/ibm-ai-robot-drug-making-lab-
in-the-cloud/

1. Then, in at least 150 words each, provide a response post to at least 2 of your classmates'
initial posts. In your responses, you should also ask questions of your classmates to help
inspire further discussion. The more discussion the better.
Your initial post is due Thursday (by end of day), and your 2 response posts are
due Sunday (also by end of day). Your Week 2 discussion assignment is worth 10 points.

The article I read was “IBM has built a new drug-making lab entirely in the cloud”, written
by Karen Hao. The new lab that IBM build is called “RoboRXN”, the lab is combined of AI
modes, cloud platforms and robots and the way it works is scientists log onto an application and
a blank canvas is opened. The scientist will start by drawing a skeletal sketch of the molecular
compounds they want to make, then the platform uses machine learning to predict the ingredients
required and the order which they could be mixed. After this step, the instructions are sent to the
robot who is in a remote lab to execute the experiment. The reason why it matters that IBM made
this lab is because a lot goes in making and bringing drugs to the market. “On average it can
take 10 years and 10 million dollars to discover a drug, get it approved for sale and bring it to the
market” (Hao,2020). In that 10 years much of the time is spent in a lab doing the same repetition
of experiment o create new compounds and learn from trial and error. IBM’s goal with
“RoboRXN” is to be “able to speed up that process by predicting the recipes for compounds and
automating experiments” (Hao, 2020). This also could lower the cost of drug development
allowing scientists to react to health crisis like the COVID pandemic. IBM is not the only one
using AI and robotics to accelerate drug making, I think this idea is good and bad at the same
time because there’s always a possibility of the software getting hacked and someone using it for
bad intentions. The reason I think this idea is good and could work in speeding up the process is
that let’s say a scientist can’t get to work because of a snow storm then he/she would be able to
work from home and not lose a day in the lab due to the weather. I can only think of two reasons
this idea could be bad in the future one is the system could always get hacked like I stated earlier
and two the system could crash because it gets overloaded and many other reasons. If the system
crashes while scientist are working on a project this could be bad because the information they
were inputting wouldn’t get saved and it would cost more their time to start over. Also, the
system could be down for days as well and that issue would cost them even more time and
money than the first issue. I chose this article because it sounded very interesting to me and AI is
the up and coming thing in the teach world, so I wanted to learn about it. I also didn’t realize it
could take up to 10 years for a medicine or treatment to be made and go to the market. This
article is also interesting because I would’ve never thought that doing making chemicals could be
possible remotely whether at home or somewhere else.