Thursday, 3 October 2024, the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest organizes the conference “Artificial Intelligence in Drug Discovery – From Model to Process, From Academic Publication to Decision Making”, held by Andreas Bender, Professor at the University of Cambridge.
The event will take place starting with 10:00 am in the Conference Hall of the Platform of Research in Biology and Systemic Ecology within the Faculty of Biology of the University of Bucharest (No 91-95 Splaiul Independenței).
Abstract of the conference
The amount of chemical and biological data available has increased in the public as well as the private domain, and both on the algorithmic and hardware side progress has been tremendous in machine learning. Press releases describe the design of functional proteins and antibodies from scratch, and several ‘first AI-designed drugs’ have already entered clinical phases.
However, all is not well when it comes to the marriage of algorithms with drug discovery, in particular when it comes to the in vivo relevance of what we are able to do with chemical and biological data at this point in time. Reasons for this are that the field is still stuck in reductionist thinking, in combination with a lack of relevant data and our ability to handle it computationally to support decision making. Likewise, chemical space behaves very different from biological information, which has a distinct impact on our ability to use predictive models in decision making processes.
This contribution will review the current status of the field, as well as provide case studies where data and computational methods have been able to select compounds with the desired effects on a biological system, and explain what currently still hampers further progress.
Further details are available here.
About the speaker
Andreas Bender is professor at the University of Cambridge and at the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. He activates also as scientist at Pangea Bio. Prof. Bender develops data science methods, including AI-based methods, for chemical discovery and chemical biology. More information about Andreas Bender are available here.
