AI-assisted drug discovery held back by private sector secrecy on datasets | Science|Business

"The discovery of new drugs is being held back because pharmaceutical firms are not sharing their data, limiting the potentially revolutionary impact of artificial intelligence on the field, according to AI experts....

Last year, for example, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported discovering a new antibiotic compound using a computer model that can screen more than 100 million compounds in a matter of days.  

But such breakthroughs are being hampered by a lack of data sharing by private companies, stymying efforts to use powerful AI models to improve healthcare, said Yoshua Bengio, an AI pioneer at the University of Montreal and one of the leaders of an OECD-backed investigation into the issue.

“The lack of open datasets is a failure of the principle of profit maximization by individual actors,” he said.

Releasing datasets “hurts their competitiveness, even though it would help the overall market to progress faster to technological solutions,” Bengio said.  ...

“The field requires a shift towards open data and open science in order to feed the most powerful, data-hungry AI algorithms,” says Artificial Intelligence for Public Domain Drug Discovery, presented at the annual conference of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), an initiative launched in 2020 under French and Canadian leadership.

In the academic community, data sharing has taken off, and is now mandatory under most government funded grants, said Bengio. Researchers are rewarded through downstream citations if they allow others to use their data.

But the incentives for the private sector are still to keep data closed. Companies need to be encouraged to share their data, “by force of contract and financial rewards for doing the right things”, Bengio said. The GPAI report also calls for government intervention to “strongly encourage” data-sharing...."