BiopharmaTrend.com

The newly organized research project “MELLODDY” (Machine Learning Ledger Orchestration for Drug Discovery), involving ten large pharma companies and seven technology providers, is that kind of deals which can catalyze a transition of the pharmaceutical industry to a new level -- a “paradigm shift”, as one might refer to it in terms of Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.

The project aims at developing a state-of-the-art platform for collaboration, based on Owkin’s blockchain architecture technology, which would allow collective training of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms using data from multiple direct pharmaceutical competitors, without exposing their internal know-hows and compromising their intellectual property -- for the collective benefit of everyone involved. 

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.

(Last updated 08.10.2018)

The type of artificial intelligence (AI) which scares some of the greatest minds, like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, is called “general artificial intelligence” -- the one which can “think” pretty much like humans do, and which can quickly evolve into a dangerous “superintelligence”. There is a notion that it might be invented in the nearest decades, but today we are definitely not there yet. The AI which is making headlines these days is a “narrow artificial intelligence”, a limited type of machine “intelligence” able to solve only a specific task or a group of tasks. It can’t go anywhere beyond specifics of the problem for which it is designed, so apparently, it will not hurt anyone in the nearest time. But already now it can provide meaningful practical results on those narrow tasks, like natural language processing, image recognition, controlling self-driving cars, and helping develop new drugs more efficiently. With the ability to find hidden and unintuitive patterns in vast amounts of data in ways that no human can do, AI represents a considerable promise to transform many industries, including pharma and biotech.