AI helps with drug discovery

Drug-target interaction is a prominent research area in drug discovery, which refers to the recognition of interactions between chemical compounds and the protein targets. Chemists estimate that 1060 compounds with drug-like properties could be made--that's more than the total number of atoms in the Solar System, as an article reported in the journal Nature in 2017. Drug development, on average, takes about 14 years and costs up to 1.5 billion dollars. During the journey of drug discovery in this vast "galaxy," it is apparent that traditional biological experiments for DTI detection are normally costly and time-consuming. Prof. Hou Tingjun is an expert in computer-aided drug design (CADD) at the Zhejiang University College of Pharmaceutical Sciences.