A REVIEW ON "CARING WITH CODE: AI'S IMPACT ON PHARMACY AND PATIENT CARE

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful tool in the pharmaceutical industry, revolutionizing the drug discovery and development process. This article explores the importance of AI in drug development and highlights the various AI tools available to modern-day pharmacists. AI has the potential to significantly reduce the time and costs associated with drug development, enhance returns on investment, and potentially decrease costs for end-users. The processing power of AI surpasses that of conventional computers, making it particularly useful in research areas such as gene mutation analysis. AI techniques like structure-activity relationship (SAR) analysis and artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been successfully applied to predict the biological activity of molecules and design novel antibiotics. For instance, Klopman's program automatically recognizes molecular structures and identifies biophores responsible for biological activity. Cherkasov et al. utilized peptide array technology and ANNs to create in silico models that predicted the antibiotic activity of virtual peptides, leading to the discovery of highly effective peptides against multidrug- resistant "superbugs." Furthermore, deep neural networks (DNNs) have been employed to predict the pharmacological activities and therapeutic categories of drugs using gene expression data from human cell lines. The integration of AI in the pharmacy profession holds immense potential for improving efficiency and advancing drug discovery and development.