Google’s AI that speeds up the discovery of new drugs

Google’s AI speeds up the discovery of new drugs

Developing new drugs can cost billions of dollars and there is not even a guarantee that the research phase will lead to an effective or marketable therapy. It is not surprising that in this new race for artificial intelligence, many projects are looking with interest at the pharmaceutical sector. At stake are orders for millions, if not billions, of euros.

Google’s AI speeds up the discovery of new drugs. Google’s Cloud division has announced two new suites designed to facilitate drug discovery and advance precision medicine. The Target and Lead Identification Suite aims to help pharmaceutical companies better understand the proteins and amino acids critical to drug development. In particular, it is designed to help scientists identify biological targets on which researchers can develop treatments. This could effectively speed drug discovery and reduce costs.

The Engadget website reports that among the first adopters of the suite “are multinational pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and industry-leading biotech companies such as Cereval”. Important customers who are clearly also claimed in the press release published by Google Cloud itself. “We are collaborating with Google to explore how AlphaFold2 can potentially accelerate our drug discovery process by streamlining the ability of our researchers to conduct their experiments on Google Cloud’s accelerator-optimized, scalable computing platform,” said Nicholas Labello, principal computational scientist at Pfizer. Google’s AI speeds up the discovery of new drugs.

The second tool, the Multiomics Suite , is designed to address the analysis of genomic data. The goal is to understand how genetic variations influence diseases in order to create suitable and even personalized treatments. Genomic databases tend to be huge, so the suite will provide researchers with quick access to the right data, helping to speed up treatments.