BiopharmaTrend.com

In contrast to early days of drug discovery, when ideas about new medicines were born primarily via “serendipitous trial-and-error” approach, or mere luck, modern drug design is a more conscious process -- owing to increased understanding of disease mechanisms and the underlying biology, advents of combinatorial chemistry, high-throughput screening, and many other experimental techniques, and, of course, advances in computational methods.

The first month of 2019 is not over yet, but there are already four major announcements about new research projects between large drug discovery corporations and smaller artificial intelligence (AI) companies -- this is more than the number of all similar announcements in the year 2014 combined -- only three.

In this Special Perspective, our fourth in an ongoing series, we will be presenting MatchMaker™, a novel deep proteome screening technology that we have developed and validated over the past 2 years to identify DTIs. MatchMaker builds on Cyclica’s passions of combining protein, chemistry, and genomic data, and augmenting it with high performance computing and algorithm development supported on the cloud.

Updated: 10.01.2019. Newly added content is marked in the text with "Update" sign.

The idea of using artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate drug discovery process and boost a success rate of pharmaceutical research programs has inspired a surge of activity in this area over the last several years. In 2018, things are getting even “hotter” with the increase in the amount of partnerships, investments and other important events, summarized and grouped below into “mini-trends”.

Over the last five years the interest of pharmaceutical professionals towards machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) has measurably increased -- while only one “AI-related” research collaboration involving “big pharma” appeared in the news in 2013, the number of such events increased up to 21 in 2017 alone, involving some of the top pharma players like GSK, Sanofi, Abbvie, Genentech, etc.