AI could speed up discovery of new medicines

Artificial intelligence that could reduce the cost and speed-up the discovery of new medicines has been developed as part of a collaboration between researchers at the University of Sheffield and AstraZeneca. The new technology, developed by Professor Haiping Lu and his Ph.D. student Peizhen Bai from Sheffield's Department of Computer Science, with Dr. Filip Miljković and Dr. Bino John from AstraZeneca, is described in a new study published in Nature Machine Intelligence. The study demonstrates that the AI, called DrugBAN, can predict whether a candidate drug will interact with its intended target protein molecules inside the human body. AI that can predict whether drugs will reach their intended targets already exists, but the technology developed by the researchers at Sheffield and AstraZeneca can do this with greater accuracy and also provide useful insights to help scientists understand how drugs engage with their protein partners at a molecular level, according to the paper published on February 2, 2023. AI has the potential to inform whether a drug will successfully engage an intended cancer-related protein, or whether a candidate drug will bind to unintended targets in the body and lead to undesirable side-effects for patients.