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This is equivalent to the work done by roughly 150 to 200 chemists in a day." This year, the company raised $65 million in series A funding, some of which will be used to build a laboratory in Singapore modeled after the Shanghai facility. For now, Hughes views ML as an additional tool rather than a replacement for chemists, as the data that ML is trained on mostly come "from years of experience from a human chemist." AI is tested in clinical trials After a molecule is manufactured and put through in vitro and rodent safety tests, it is tested in humans in a series of clinical trials. In May 2024, Derek Lowe, the chemist who writes the In the Pipeline blog, published a critical analysis of a study by Meier's BCG team that found that, of the 67 molecules from AI–drug discovery companies that were in clinical trials in 2023, 24 were directed at "AI-discovered" targets. And when AI models are trained on data that are limited in quality or quantity, chances are the models will spew out some answer, but it may not be what works in clinical settings, says Nevan Krogan, director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at the University of California, San Francisco, and cofounder of Rezo Therapeutics, a biotech firm that uses computational and other tools to unpack the biology around human diseases."