Oliver May is Managing Director of SynSilico® which offers AI-based services to Life Science and Materials Science companies. In addition he is responsible to support the growth ambition of InnoSyn®, one of the parent companies of SynSilico.
Oliver received his academic education from the University of Stuttgart and did a post-doc at the California Institute of Technology. Before joining InnoSyn and SynSilico in 2024, he had a 25 years industrial career in Industrial Biotechnology leading teams at Degussa and DSM.

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are transforming various scientific disciplines by enabling novel insights and accelerating research and development processes. This review focuses on the application of AI/ML in life sciences (biotechnology, pharmaceuticals), and materials science. Each section explores the current status, potential challenges, and future prospects of AI/ML in these domains.

Introduction

In 2024 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Geoffrey Hinton and John J. Hopfield to recognize their foundational discoveries that enabled ML based on artificial neural networks. Those fundamental developments happened in the 1980s when computational power and access to data for training models was still limited. Advances in computation and deep learning algorithms for artificial neural networks driven by applications in physics changed dramatically and led to fundamental breakthroughs in AI/ML in the 2000s. Today, machines can execute tasks which partly outperform human experts and even world champions in their fields like in chess and the ancient Chinese strategy board game GO.

The life and materials science community also started to embrace the benefits of AI/ML around the same period to generate faster, better and/or more insights from rapidly accumulating data. Many of those insights escaped our human intuition and understanding before due to the complexity of underlying mechanisms of the studied biological systems and materials.

The breakthroughs of AI/ML that have been ...