AI predicts ahead of time which drugs will appear on the illegal market

New types of designer drugs are created every year. Designer (from English to design - to design,

develop) are substances thatare developed in order to circumvent prohibitive legislation. Because of the lengthy process of identification and classification, they pose a particular danger because they are legal up to a point. Identifying so-called "legal highs" in seized pills or powders can take months, during which time thousands of people may have already used new designer drug. 

According to the University of BritishColombia, a new development is already helping law enforcement agencies around the world reduce the time it takes to identify designer drugs from months to days, which is critical in the race to identify and regulate new versions of dangerous psychoactive drugs.

Scientists used a database of knownpsychoactive substances provided by forensic laboratories around the world to train artificial intelligence. They used a neural network that studied the chemical structures of drugs. Based on training, the model generated approximately 8.9 million potential designer drugs.

The resulting molecules were compared with 196 psychoactivesubstances that appeared on the illegal market after the model was trained. It turned out that she predicted the emergence of 90% of new designer drugs. The results of the study are published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

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