A large number of pharmaceutical companies are now utilizing AI to develop drugs. Google Cloud has unveiled two new suites of AI tools that aim to help the pharmaceutical industry accelerate drug discovery and make it cheaper.
The suites, called Target and Lead Identification Suite and Multiomics Suite, leverage Google’s expertise in machine learning, cloud computing and bioinformatics to tackle some of the biggest challenges in drug development.
“We’ve long been involved with creating new tools for understanding and working with the code of life, like high performance computing for genomic analytics, and artificial intelligence that can predict three-dimensional models of proteins,” said Shweta Maniar, global director, life sciences strategy and solutions at Google Cloud.
“These new solutions launching today can transform life sciences organizations by accelerating drug discovery and bringing therapeutics to market faster. When patients are waiting for that life-saving treatment in cancer care or that quality-of-life medicine for migraine headaches, this faster time-to-market can have an incredibly positive impact on lives.”
‘The Target and Lead Identification Suite’ is designed to help drug companies better understand the molecular mechanisms of diseases and identify potential targets and leads for new therapies. The suite uses Google’s AlphaFold2 system, which can predict the structure of proteins, which can help pharmaceutical companies minimize “the high ratio of failures from traditional methods.”
The suite also aims to help companies streamline the ingestion, sharing, and management of data, allowing for more discovering to be made through public datasets, and exchanging data with other companies through Google Cloud’s Analytics Hub.
Lastly, the suite uses high-performance computing resources to find and prepare lead candidates through a high-throughput screening method. This helps pharmaceutical companies “find the most promising lead candidate molecules to start a successful drug discovery pipeline.”
Some of the early adopters of the suite include multinational pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and industry-leading biotech companies like Cereval. “We are partnering with Google on exploring how AlphaFold2 can potentially accelerate our drug discovery process, speeding up our researchers’ ability to conduct their experiments on Google Cloud’s scalable, accelerator-optimized compute platform,” said Nicholas Labello, principal computational scientist at Pfizer.
‘The Multiomics Suite’ is designed to help researchers analyze large-scale genomic data and uncover how genetic variations affect disease outcomes and treatment responses. The suite integrates Google’s DeepVariant tool, which can accurately conduct genomic analysis. One of the early adopters of the suite is Colossal Biosciences, a biotech company that aims to use gene editing to bring back extinct species like the Woolly Mammoth, the Tasmanian Tiger, and the Dodo.
Read more about the development here.
Image credit: Shutterstock
Source: Google Cloud
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