SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO — At Genentech, many of the company’s drug designers are making molecules for a machine that are, for lack of a better word, weird.
The new molecules don’t look like they’ll be better drugs. They don’t always make sense. But they make the computer happier. And as America’s oldest biotech reinvents itself to be at the forefront of a machine-learning race, this odd molecular work is training the algorithms upon which Genentech’s new leaders are betting its future.
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