"Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a bright future in the area of drug discovery and development", Prof. Howard Lee agreed. But, he went on saying, "The focus has been drug discovery, particularly de novo search of new 'drug-like' molecules, which came up with a mix of some successes and mostly failures." To Prof. Lee, there is a more important area where AI applications have not been tried much, and that is clinical development, more expensive, lengthy, and riskier. These statements were made at a K-Healthcare Business Forum, co-sponsored by Young Doctors, KBR, and KHIDI, on October 13, 2023.

In a speech entitled "AI-based drug development: Hype or Reality?", Prof. Lee explained why the application of AI technologies has been mostly limited to early stage or drug discovery, and how this can be expanded to the later phase of drug development such as preclinical toxicity prediction and more robust and efficient design and conduct of clinical trials. The details of Prof. Lee's talk can be found in this news paper article.