The ‘compuchem’-AI showdown

As soon as you enter Schrödinger’s headquarters, on the 24th floor of a building in New York City’s Times Square, the company’s association with chemistry and physics is evident. Rooms are named after atomic particles. Multicolored light bulbs are placed to represent molecular structures. For over 30 years, Schrödinger—named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger—has been providing computational chemistry services to hundreds of pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms looking to discover new drugs. But it has also spun out and cofounded other companies, as well as developed its own drug candidates. In addition, Schrödinger has watched the field become more competitive and change focus from its brand of physics-based computation. Most recently, rival service providers—as well as drug companies themselves—are touting artificial intelligence in their pitches to investors and clients. AI proponents purport that the technology shortens the time needed to find new biological targets and discover and design compounds