'We are doing in a few months what would normally take a drug development process years to do': DoE's Argonne Labs battles COVID-19 with AI

Something like a pandemic can speed up scientific research. Case in point, neural networks are turning up new kinds of signals in the COVID-19 disease that may change how scientists look for cures. Argonne National Laboratories, one of nine giant supercomputing centers of the U.S. Department of Energy, has for several months now been employing massive computing power, including novel machines from the Silicon Valley startup Cerebras Systems, to model how existing drugs "dock" with proteins of the virus, meaning, how well a drug attaches to the functional part of a virus. SEE: Life after lockdown: Your office job will never be the same--here's what to expect (cover story PDF) (TechRepublic) If a drug can be found to dock well, that drug can in theory disable the virus. Predicting such docking scores in a computer simulation can guide scientists to a short list of drugs to try in the lab with live virus.