AI3SD Video: A vision of Medicinal Chemistry for the future

Historically, medicinal chemistry and computational chemistry have been separate roles within a drug discovery organization requiring differing backgrounds and expertise. Increasingly in the modern world and going forwards these skillsets are coming closer and closer together, empowered by automation and increasingly advanced computational methods. Over time, there has been an increase in the amount of time a medicinal chemist spends at a computer compared with time in the lab which is expected to continue. For computational chemists, historically, the core skills were of computer science, not of chemistry due to the lack of well developed tools and computing power. As time goes on, with increases in the user friendliness of available tools and increases in automation, these roles are likely to move closer together, with others joining the field with more mixed skillsets too. The role of automation will likely increase allowing for easier synthetic tasks to be carried out by robots, and the more trivial thinking tasks to be carried out by a computer, leaving human scientists to perform more challenging laboratory work, and think about the most important problems. This presentation will discuss the likely necessary skills of the future, compared to those of today, and the role automation has to play in this transition.