{"id":142131,"date":"2022-07-13T12:22:31","date_gmt":"2022-07-13T17:22:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/artificial-intelligence-model-finds-potential-drug-molecules-a-thousand-times-faster"},"modified":"2022-07-13T12:22:31","modified_gmt":"2022-07-13T17:22:31","slug":"artificial-intelligence-model-finds-potential-drug-molecules-a-thousand-times-faster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/artificial-intelligence-model-finds-potential-drug-molecules-a-thousand-times-faster","title":{"rendered":"Artificial intelligence model finds potential drug molecules a thousand times faster"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/artificial-intelligence-model-finds-potential-drug-molecules-a-thousand-times-faster.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The entirety of the known universe is teeming with an infinite number of molecules. But what fraction of these molecules have potential drug-like traits that can be used to develop life-saving drug treatments? Millions? Billions? Trillions? The answer: novemdecillion, or 10<sup>60<\/sup>. This gargantuan number prolongs the drug development process for fast-spreading diseases like COVID-19 because it is far beyond what existing drug design models can compute. To put it into perspective, the Milky Way has about 100 thousand million, or 10<sup>8<\/sup>, stars.<\/p>\n<p>In a paper that will be presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), MIT researchers developed a geometric deep-learning model called EquiBind that is 1,200 times faster than one of the fastest existing computational molecular docking models, QuickVina2-W, in successfully binding drug-like molecules to proteins. EquiBind is based on its predecessor, EquiDock, which specializes in binding two proteins using a technique developed by the late Octavian-Eugen Ganea, a recent MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic) postdoc, who also co-authored the EquiBind paper.<\/p>\n<p>Before <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/tags\/drug+development\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">drug development<\/a> can even take place, drug researchers must find promising drug-like molecules that can bind or \u201cdock\u201d properly onto certain protein targets in a process known as <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/tags\/drug+discovery\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">drug discovery<\/a>. After successfully docking to the protein, the binding drug, also known as the ligand, can stop a protein from functioning. If this happens to an essential protein of a bacterium, it can kill the bacterium, conferring protection to the human body.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The entirety of the known universe is teeming with an infinite number of molecules. But what fraction of these molecules have potential drug-like traits that can be used to develop life-saving drug treatments? Millions? Billions? Trillions? The answer: novemdecillion, or 1060. This gargantuan number prolongs the drug development process for fast-spreading diseases like COVID-19 because [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1495,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-health","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}