How AI Could Prevent the Development of New Illicit Drugs

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 05:00:00 GMT
Scientific American - Technology

The DarkNPS algorithm has predicted the formulas of millions of potential drugs

While illicit drug chemists work on new formulas, governments around the world try to regulate and ban the drugs quickly after they appear.

According to Wishart, there is another advantage: Governments could go through the cache of hypothetical drugs DarkNPS developed and ban them, even before anyone actually produces or distributes them.

According to a press release, some agencies are already using the algorithm, including the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, and the Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany.

Although the algorithm may be able to capture drugs that are relatively similar to their predecessors, it may struggle to predict drugs with radically different chemical structures, says Alex Krotulski, associate director at the Center for Forensic Science Research & Education and manager of the organization's NPS Discovery program.

The DarkNPS team trained their algorithm using HighResNPS. When the work began in February 2021, the database had more than 1,700 entries of existing drugs sourced from around the world.

The algorithm could also effectively give illicit chemists a roadmap to new designer drugs.

DarkNPS is sitting in the hands of the NPS Data Hub - a joint effort between the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the U.S. DEA, and the Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany - which acts as a database to aid in the identification of new drugs.

According to an article by Ann Fordham, the International Drug Policy Consortium's executive director, Black people in the U.S. are incarcerated five times more than White people, and half of these sentences are related to drugs.

In a way governments' banning existing drugs may also incentivize the creation of NPS. "It's not dealing with the fundamental problem," Stevens said, "Which is that people can't get legal access to the drugs they actually want to use, and so will seek alternatives."

WHILE DARKNPS COULD help facilitate wide-scale illicit drug bans, some say the approach could hinder the development of new medicines by making it harder for researchers to study drugs that have potential medical applications.

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