AI Drug Discovery

It took an AI agent called peptAI 24 hours to design a novel ADHD peptide candidate from scratch, run it through an eight-gate validation pipeline, and spit out a molecule ready for wet lab testing. The lab work cost a few thousand dollars. BIO Protocol’s token, the platform underwriting this, rallied 105%, and within hours half of Crypto Twitter had “DeSci” in their bios the same way they had “AI” six months prior and “RWA” six months before that.

I spent the last week trying to figure out what, if anything, is actually different this time.

Surviving Phase I Is Not A Personality

The number floating around is that AI-discovered drugs post 80-90% Phase I success rates against a traditional baseline of roughly 47%. What nobody adds is that Phase I tests whether a drug kills you, not whether it cures you. Clearing it means your compound is safe enough to keep studying but has yet to go through the rest of the funnel all the way to