By Pharma’s Almanac | February 2, 2026
Over the next decade, AI will continue to play an important and expanding role in biopharma, particularly in data integration, target identification, and optimization within well-charted chemical and biological spaces. That said, there remains a fundamental limitation: AI systems can only extrapolate from what has already been observed. Large areas of chemical space, especially higher-order, conformationally constrained architectures, remain effectively inaccessible because they cannot be readily synthesized or screened at scale. As a result, many biologically relevant interaction modes, particularly those that resemble natural protein–protein interfaces, remain underexplored despite major computational advances.