Estimating that it will cost billions of dollars to develop drugs, it is no surprise that the majority of them fail in the clinical trial stage. To address this problem, several firms have begun to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to speed up the process of drug discovery and advance medical precision. In the latest move in this race, Google’s Cloud division has unveiled two brand-new software suites to address the issue of drug discovery and development.
The first suite, Target and Lead Identification Suite, is designed to assist drug companies in understanding the proteins and amino acids that are critical in the process of creating drugs. This suite is aimed at helping scientists discover biological targets that can be targeted with medication. It has the potential to accelerate research, improve the drug discovery process, and reduce costs. Adopters of this suite include multinational pharmaceuticals such as Pfizer and biotech firms like Cereval. According to Principal Computational Scientist Nicholas Labello from Pfizer, the firm is partnering with Google to explore ways to expedite the drug discovery process using the AlphaFold2 system on Google Cloud’s accelerator-optimized computing platform.
The second suite, the Multiomics Suite, focuses on the analysis of genomic data. It is utilized to identify genetic variations which contribute to diseases to enable personalized, data-driven treatment approaches. Minimizing the time and cost associated with huge gene-based databases, the Multiomics Suite allows researchers quick accessibility to pertinent information to speed up treatments. Ben Lamm, CEO of Colossal Biosciences, one of the first organizations to adopt the Multiomics Suite, told CNBC that it would have been a “massive weight” for Colossal to try to construct a comparable system.
Source: https://www.engadget.com/googles-latest-ai-tackles-long-and-costly-drug-discovery-121959099.html
