Presented By: DCMB Seminar Series
CCMB/DCMB Weekly Bioinformatics Seminar Series featuring Peter Toogood, PhD (Research Associate Professor and Director of Michigan Drug Discovery (MDD))
"Applications of AI to Hit Finding in Drug Discovery Projects"
High throughput screening (HTS) is a common starting point for small molecule drug discovery campaigns, especially when the biological target is new. HTS is commonly conducted in the wet lab (e.g. the U-M Center for Chemical Genomics), but also can be conducted in silico. These "virtual screens" are either structure-based, requiring a knowledge of the 3D structure of the biological target, or ligand-based, in which case having multiple overlapping ligands makes it easier to define the feature set that new ligands must match. In this talk, I will describe several applications of artificial intelligence/machine learning to virtual screening in our projects seeking to identify new starting points for cancer drug discovery. In so doing, I will trace the evolution of these methods over the last decade from crude attempts at generative design to the application of frontier models like Claude Science.