How researchers are using AI to speed up drug discovery and development: Q&A Sadie Harley Scientific Editor Andrew Zinin Chief Editor Drug development is among the slowest, most failure-prone processes in modern science, with about 90% of drug candidates never reaching the market. Today, artificial intelligence methods have accelerated the first step—plucking promising molecules out of endless possibilities—but countless challenges remain. A successful drug must be not only safe and effective but also able to bypass the body's defenses and reach the right target.

Most drug candidates fail during optimization. That's where a new research institute at the University of Washington has focused its attention. Housed in the UW School of Pharmacy, the Institute for Innovations in Drug Delivery and Disposition (I2D3) brings together experts in artificial intelligence, drug discovery, pharmacology, data science and biotechnology to ease the bottleneck between promising molecules and successful drugs.

The Institute opened in July 2026 and is led by three UW faculty members: Gaurav Bhardwaj, an associate professor of medicinal chemistry who oversees the Institute's AI-enabled molecular design; Nina Isoherranen, the Milo Gibaldi Chair of Pharmaceutics and an expert in drug metabolism and disposition; and Marco Pravetoni, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science in the UW School of Medicine, who leads drug discovery, translation and commercialization efforts. UW News spoke with the three co-directors about why drug candidates fail, how AI is speeding drug development and how I2D3 hopes to help get drugs to market more quickly. What separates a promising molecule from a full-fledged drug?

What properties need to be considered, and how can a developer work toward them? Gaurav Bhardwaj: It really depends on the disease indication you are targeting and the therapeutic modality. Let's say you have a promising molecule that interacts with the disease-causing protein.

Delivery becomes equally important—do we need an orally delivered drug? Do we need to cross the blood-brain barrier? If the disease requires daily dosing, then injectable or IV methods aren't optimal.

If it's delivered orally, then the molecule needs to be able to get across the gut barrier and also needs to be stable enough that it doesn't get chewed up by the body. It also needs to stay in the body for a reasonable time. A successful drug molecule has to meet all these criteria and more, and ultimately all these criteria are encoded by the sequence and structure of the molecule.

The Institute is devoted to aspects of drug development that are often overlooked. What problem do you see the Institute being able to help solve? GB: Traditional drug discovery and development is a trial-and-error process.

Either you find a useful molecule in nature and spend years optimizing it for human use, or you create many random combinations of molecules and hope that one of them has the function you need. Both approaches have low success rates, which has created a bottleneck. Now the field is also focusing on an idea called rational drug design.

It started long before AI but is now becoming even more common.