Meet the company leveraging AI-backed physics tools for drug discovery

Euronews

22-05-2025

Europe's teenagers are increasingly picking up e-cigarettes and turning down drugs and alcohol, according to a new analysis on students' habits across the continent.
The new report, known as the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD), included nearly 114,000 students aged 15 and 16 across 37 European countries.
It has tracked trends in European teens' drug use, smoking habits, alcohol consumption, and more for 30 years. Here's how teenagers stacked up in 2024.
While smoking rates have fallen since the 1990s, the likelihood that preteen girls smoke on a daily basis has risen in recent years, the analysis found.
E-cigarette use is also continuing to climb, with 44 per cent of students having tried e‑cigarettes at least once and 22 per cent saying they vape regularly, up from 14 per cent five years earlier.
Most teens say vapes are easy to get, and the trend is "fuelling concerns over the dual use of traditional and electronic cigarettes and reflecting a broader shift toward alternative nicotine products," the report said.
Notably, alcohol seems to be getting less popular, with both overall consumption and binge drinking falling over the past two decades.
However, heavy drinking among teens remains a problem in some regions, with the highest rates in Denmark (55 per cent), Germany (49 per cent), and Austria (48 per cent).
Adolescents are also drinking at younger ages, the report found. About three in four students have tried alcohol, and one in three had their first drink at age 13 or younger.
In 2024, 12 per cent of students had tried cannabis – making it the most commonly used illegal drug in Europe, despite the fact that this is the lowest level recorded since 1995.
Teen boys are generally more likely to use cannabis than girls, but that gap is narrowing.
Cocaine and ecstasy (also known as MDMA) are the next-most popular illegal drugs, with about 2 per cent of students ever having tried them, followed by LSD or other hallucinogens and amphetamines.
Overall, 13 per cent of teenagers have tried illegal drugs at least once, and that prevalence has slowly fallen since around 2015. However, there are big differences between countries, with rates ranging from 3.9 per cent in Georgia and Moldova to 25 per cent in Liechtenstein.
Notably, European students are increasingly taking prescription drugs for non-medical reasons; 8.5 per cent have tried tranquillisers and sedatives, while 6.9 per cent have taken painkillers to get high, the analysis shows.
Four in five teens play video games at least once per month – but gaming is no longer dominated by teen boys, the report found.
While boys are still more likely to be gamers, girls' gaming prevalence has more than tripled since 2015, rising from 22 per cent to 71 per cent last year.
On the flip side, girls are also more likely to use social media in a way they view as problematic – but boys have seen a bigger increase in harmful social media use over the past decade.
Overall, nearly half of students reported problematic social media use in 2024.
Nearly one in four teens has gambled for money in the past year, including playing slot machines, lotteries, card or dice games, or placing bets on sports or animal races.
Most of this gambling takes place in person, though 65 per cent of teen gamblers do it online.
Boys are more likely to gamble than girls, though there is also wide variation among countries. Gambling rates range from 9.5 per cent in Georgia to 45 per cent in Italy.
"Although many European countries have adopted stricter gambling regulations in recent years, with a heightened focus on protecting minors, gambling among European adolescents has remained stable," the report said.
A startup in France is leveraging artificial intelligence-backed physics principles in the hope of speeding up the process of making new drugs.
Currently, developing a new medicine takes a company 10 to 15 years on average, with research conducted in a lab environment – and a lot of trial and error before they enter multiple stages of human clinical trials.
It's also an expensive process, with only 10 to 20 per cent of experimental drugs in clinical trials eventually being approved.
Those are problems the France-based Aqemia is trying to solve.
The company, founded in 2019 by quantum physics researcher Maximilien Levesque and Emmanuelle Martiano, a former consultant for Boston Consulting Group, aims to use artificial intelligence (AI) to more efficiently create new molecules for drugs that treat cancers of the head, neck, and chest, such as lung cancer.
It wants to "develop medicine faster in a frugal and accurate way," Dr Véronique Birault, Aqemia's vice president of translational sciences, told Euronews Health at the company's new London hub, which opened in January.
To do so, Aqemia is using both AI and fundamental physics, which Levesque worked on during his academic career. Many healthcare companies are turning to AI tools in the drug discovery process, but they usually need to be trained on a large corpus of data – which doesn't always exist for these new molecules, according to Levesque.
For example, "there aren't billions and billions and billions of drugs for chest cancer" that the AI models could be trained on, Levesque told Euronews Health.
Instead of feeding their AI model with raw data, the team feeds it the rules of physics at the level of atoms and molecules tied to specific diseases. That includes a mathematical equation that Levesque solved, which the team says can be leveraged to identify "better molecules" that are "more effective".
"It's as if, rather than swallowing lists of numbers, you had a maths teacher teaching you how to count," Levesque added.
Aqemia isn't the only company betting on AI for drug discovery. Worldwide, 10 major pharmaceutical companies have signed more than 130 deals for AI collaborations since 2021.
AI models can quickly analyse datasets to uncover patterns, helping scientists predict which molecules are linked to certain diseases and identifying promising drug candidates for new drugs or treatments.
To some extent, they can also help forecast how people will respond to new drugs. For example, Google's AlphaFold system – which won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024 – uses AI to predict a protein's 3D structure and how it will interact with other molecules.
Aqemia has signed partnerships with pharmaceutical giants like Sanofi, Servier, and Johnson & Johnson to research potential new drugs, Levesque said.
But he cautioned that even as the company works on speeding up the molecular development phase, it can't influence the clinical development stage, which takes an average of nine years.
Some research indicates that may also be changing. A handful of AI-discovered molecules are in early stage trials, with cancer-related drugs making up about half of those in phase one and phase two studies.
Aqemia could be part of the next wave.
"Our internal programmes are progressing and we already have programmes showing efficacy and non-toxicity on mice with cancer," he said.
The company hopes to launch clinical trials testing new molecules in late 2026 or early 2027.
Stripped of US funding, the World Health Organization (WHO) chief asked member countries to support its "extremely modest" budget request by comparing it to the cost of war or outlays for ad campaigns for tobacco.
After nearly 80 years of striving to improve human lives and health – which critics say it has done poorly or not enough – the United Nations health agency is fighting for its own after US President Donald Trump halted funding from the United States, which has traditionally been WHO's largest donor.
The WHO wants $4.2 billion (€3.7 billion) for its next budget cycle, equating to $2.1 billion per year (€1.8 billion).
The annual sum is "the equivalent of global military expenditure every eight hours," WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
"And $2.1 billion [€1.8 billion] is one-quarter of what the tobacco industry spends on advertising and promotion every single year. Again, a product that kills people," he told the WHO's annual assembly in Geneva.
"It seems somebody switched the price tags on what is truly valuable in our world".
Tedros made no specific reference to the US cuts but has said previously that the pullout was a "mistake" and urged Washington, which did not send a delegation to the assembly, to reconsider.
WHO has presented a budget for the next two years that is 22 per cent less than originally planned, largely in response to US and other Western funding cuts, and says it has landed commitments for about 60 per cent of that.
But it still faces a budget gap of $1.7 billion (€1.5 billion).
"We know that in the current landscape,** mobilising that sum will be a challenge," Tedros said,** though he called the request "extremely modest" given the organisation's on-the-ground work in 150 countries.
As a result of the cuts, the WHO has seen a plunge in its ability to carry out its sweeping mandate to do everything from recommend reductions in sugar levels in soft drinks to head the global response to pandemics like COVID-19 or outbreaks like polio or Ebola.
Tedros and his team have been grappling with a response to the US cuts as well as reduced outlays from wealthy European countries that are worried about an expansionist Russia and are putting more money toward defence, and less toward humanitarian and development aid.
Matthew Kavanagh, the director of Georgetown University's Center for Global Health Policy and Politics in the US, said other countries have used the US cut in aid "as cover to do their maneuvering, with many countries in Europe reducing aid".
"Literally millions will likely die needlessly on the current trajectory, and the world's health ministers do not seem capable of a coherent response," Kavanagh added.
Trump has long derided WHO, including back in his first term when he pulled the US out over its alleged kowtowing to China and other alleged missteps in the COVID-19 pandemic.
After former President Joe Biden reversed the decision, Trump again said he would withdraw the US from the organisation on his first day back in office in January.
Other opponents continue to lash out at WHO.
CitizenGo, an activist group that supports right-to-life and religious liberty issues, protested Monday outside the UN compound in Geneva where WHO's meeting was taking place.
The rally included an image of Tedros and billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, a major WHO supporter, shaking hands while surrounded by dollars.
In the run-up to the assembly, WHO has been cleaning the house and cutting costs.
At a meeting on its budget last week, Tedros – a former Ethiopian health and foreign minister – announced a shake-up of top management that included the exit of key adviser Dr Michael Ryan from the job as emergencies chief.
Tedros said last week that the loss of US funds and other assistance has left the WHO with a salary gap of more than $500 million (€440 million).