Today, the development of new drugs is still an "adventure", and the clinical failure rate is very high. According to statistics, new drug development takes an average of 10 years and costs $1 billion, but the success rate is less than 10%.
Take cancer as an example, if the tumor is a lock, the target is the keyhole, and the drug is the key, in order to find the most suitable key, researchers need to spend a lot of energy and time to screen candidate molecules.
At present, artificial intelligence (AI) in the era of large models is empowering all industries. In Daxing biomedical industry base, known as "China's pharmaceutical valley", there are enterprises and scientific research institutes to find "new keys" through this new technology. The traditional "10% success rate of $1 billion in 10 years" for new drug development is being broken. In the field of medical robot research and development, AI also plays an important role.
Unlike the impression that the R&D teams of pharmaceuticals are all wearing white coats to do experiments, in Hotgen Biotech's Center for Drug Discovery and Design, some people are confronted with data and models of drug molecules on a computer screen.
The core members of this team come from top international universities and research institutes of Tsinghua University, Peking University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese People's Liberation Army Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Peking Union Medical College, University of Massachusetts, Johns Hopkins University, and Drexel University, with background in information science, pharmaceutical engineering, and biotechnology, etc.
The introduction of AI to develop new drugs is an interdisciplinary discipline that requires many professional talents to work together. Not long ago, their research results were published in authoritative international journals.
"Computer technology-assisted R&D of new drugs is not a new concept, scientists began to try as early as the 1980s in China. However, due to the technology at the time, we could only form a simple model, not at the enterprise level.” Xu Lida, director of the center, said that with the rapid development of computing power and experimental technology, the large amount of precious data accumulated by pharmaceutical companies in the development process has more uses. Compared with information companies, pharmaceutical companies have also gained certain advantages in building AI algorithm models. "We build our own algorithmic processes using cutting-edge technology, and then train the model on public and internal data to make it 'smarter'."
Located in the same building as the X-Gen AI New Drug Discovery and Design Research Center are Hotgen Biotech's extensive specialty laboratories. The results of the AI model will be verified in the lab in multiple rounds to further improve the molecular structure of the drug for better efficacy. In addition to discovering "new keys" with the help of AI algorithm models, Hotgen Biotech is also looking forward to finding "new keyholes," or new targets. By then, the enterprise will have added a brand new track and be in a leading position.
As the main land for the development of Beijing's medical and health industry, Daxing Biomedical Industry Base has actively introduced the cross-integration projects of medical and health, artificial intelligence, and big data, promoting the cutting-edge technologies of life and health in the industry base.
At present, the park's "AI+ medical" projects have gathered, and AI pharmaceutical innovation enterprises such as Deep Intelligent Pharma and Presicion Gene have been introduced to the park to build a biological sample database and information intelligence center. The park deeply integrates biotechnology and AI, to build a high-quality AI biomedical service and incubation platform with the innovative collaboration of "government, industry, university, research and medicine".
(Excerpted from Beijing Daily)
Updated: Aug 05, 2024
