'Eve' The Robot Scientist From University of Manchester Speeds Up Drug Recovery Process

The speed with which automation is entering the field of science is phenomenal. Robotic scientists of today are capable of conducting experiments, study their observations, interpret & analyze the results and do it all tirelessly on loop till satisfactory results are achieved. This has led to rapid hypothesis-led automated research work. Now a team of researchers from the University of Manchester has developed a robot scientist called 'EVE'. Designed with an aim to speed up the process of drug discovery, Robot Eve can help in identifying promising new drug candidates for various diseases such as malaria, African sleeping sickness and Chagas’ disease.

Pharmaceutical industry fails to completely tackle these tropical diseases that infect millions of people around the world, because the cost & speed required to discover the small molecule drugs is infeasible. Using a robot scientist like Eve, researchers can exploit the technology of Artificial Intelligence to select, screen and separate the compounds that can help in discovering drugs way faster than the existing systems.


Eve is designed to automate early-stage drug design. Eve’s robotic system can screen more than 10,000 compounds each day. To improve the process of screening on such mass level, Robot Eve selects a subset of the library at random so as to find compounds that pass the first assay; any ‘hits’ are re-tested multiple times to reduce the probability of false positives. Taking a step ahead, the researchers at Cambridge believe that the future version of Robot Eve would posses the ability to not only discover but synthesise such compounds too.

Take a look at the short video to see Robot Scientist Eve in action -

What are your thoughts about the arrival of robot scientists and their use in drug discovery and their applications in pharmaceutical industry in general? Share with us in comments below.

Source: Artificially-intelligent Robot Scientist ‘Eve’ could boost search for new drugs | University of Cambridge