Tuesday, July 3, 2018

How Virtual Drug Discovery Tools Could Even the Playing Field

While AI can lift competition and productivity, it also can act as a great leveler, putting smaller players on the same footing as goliaths. Take pharmaceutical research, for example. Large companies have the budget and resources to physically test millions of drug candidates, giving them an advantage over startups and researchers. But smaller labs can achieve similar results by harnessing neural networks that simulate how a potential drug molecule will bind with a target protein. Deep learning can help smaller companies and other researchers discover promising drug treatments by improving the speed and accuracy of molecular docking, the process of computationally predicting how and how well a molecule binds with a protein.