What's Google up to in the realm of drug discovery?

YES, THOSE ARE ALLBIRDS SNEAKERS THAT GOOGLE'S AI CHIEF JEFF DEAN IS WEARING. (REBECCA ROBBINS/STAT)

As Google pushes into health care, it's made headlines for its work using algorithms to try to detect eye conditions and predict heart attacks, strokes, and deaths. The company has been much quieter, however, when it comes to any efforts in the booming field in which AI is being deployed to try to discover drugs.

On stage yesterday at a health tech conference at Stanford, the legendary Google programmer Jeff Dean made a brief mention of such work. "Deep learning can help with drug discovery," Dean told the crowd. "We have a system that can dramatically accelerate by about 300,000 times the abilities of computers to do simulations of what happens when you have ... two molecules — do they bind together or not?"

Dean, who was once called "the Chuck Norris of the Internet" and now heads up Google's AI efforts, pointed to a 2017 paper from Google researchers. That study described a new technique, using a type of machine learning, to try to predict how molecules will behave at a chemical level; it worked for 11 out of 13 targets that were tested. The paper claims that Google researchers' technique can make inferences 300,000 faster than a benchmark method.

A Google spokesperson said the company doesn’t have any updates or fresh research in this realm.