AI drug discovery's year of evidence

Nearly eight years into the artificial intelligence (AI) drug discovery boom, no medicine discovered or designed with AI has been approved by a regulator in any major market. What the field has accumulated by August 2026 is capital, trial starts and a thin first layer of human data.

Counting the pipeline is harder than it sounds. One analysis presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology this year identified 117 AI-enabled assets across 63 companies that had entered interventional human trials, of which 60 had completed Phase I and eight had completed Phase II. Other trackers put the figure closer to 175 programs, with roughly $60 billion invested since 2019 and 15 to 20 candidates potentially entering pivotal Phase III trials this year.