Google Cloud Launches AI-powered Solutions
Google Cloud announced two new AI-powered life sciences solutions to
accelerate drug discovery and precision medicine for biotech companies,
pharmaceutical firms, and public sector organizations. Available worldwide
today, the Target and Lead Identification Suite helps researchers better
identify the function of amino acids and predict the structure of proteins; and
the Multiomics Suite accelerates the discovery and interpretation of genomic
data, helping companies design precision treatments.
“We’ve long been involved with
creating new tools for understanding and working with the code of life, like
high performance computing for genomic analytics, and artificial intelligence
that can predict three-dimensional models of proteins,” said Shweta Maniar,
global director, Life Sciences Strategy and Solutions, Google Cloud. “These new
solutions launching today can transform life sciences organizations by
accelerating drug discovery and bringing therapeutics to market faster. When
patients are waiting for that life-saving treatment in cancer care or that
quality-of-life medicine for migraine headaches, this faster time-to-market can
have an incredibly positive impact on lives.”
Accelerating
Drug Discovery with the Target and Lead Identification Suite
Speeding up target and lead
identification is critical for the race to drug discovery. Currently,
developing a new drug from an original idea to the launch of a finished product
is a complex process that can take 12–15 years and cost more than $1
billion, according to the British Journal of Pharmacology. In
addition, identifying a biological target involved in the disease that is
viable for drug intervention can take up to 12 months. At the same time, most
companies use X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to
determine protein 3D structures, but this has a high ratio of failures.
Finally, once the drug discovery process is underway, it’s not easy to scale
supporting technology up or down based on demand.
Google Cloud’s Target and Lead Identification Suite enables biopharma
companies to bring therapeutics to market faster by enabling more efficient in
silico drug design. Its target identification will help companies quickly
predict antibody structures, assess the structure and function of amino acid
mutagenesis, and accelerate de novo protein design. This solution also enables
lead optimization that can be used to discover novel, high-quality candidates
at low cost for Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship (QSAR) studies or
for Free Energy Perturbation (FEP) calculations.
The Target and Lead Identification Suite includes:
· Data ingestion: Allows companies
to streamline the ingestion, sharing, and management of data, including
discovering more data for research through public datasets and securely
exchanging data assets with other organizations using Google Cloud’s Analytics
Hub.
· Target identification: Using AlphaFold2
and Vertex AI pipelines, organizations can more accurately predict protein
structure, minimizing the high ratio of failures from traditional methods.
· Lead identification: With
cost-effective high-performance computing resources, the solution accelerates
target discovery, preparation of lead candidates, and virtual high-throughput
screening, to find the most promising lead candidate molecules to start a
successful drug discovery pipeline.
Early adopters for the Target and Lead Identification Suite include
multinational pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, and industry leading
biotech companies like Cerevel.
“We are partnering with Google on exploring how AlphaFold2 can
potentially accelerate our drug discovery process, speeding up our researchers’
ability to conduct their experiments on Google Cloud’s scalable,
accelerator-optimized compute platform,” said Nicholas Labello, sr. principal
computational scientist at Pfizer, Inc.
“At Cerevel we aim to unravel the mysteries of the brain to solve some
of the most difficult to treat neuroscience diseases, including evaluating
novel therapies for schizophrenia, epilepsy, and Parkinson’s disease. The Target
and Lead Identification Suite with AlphaFold gives us a valuable tool to more
efficiently evaluate and improve our discovery efforts,” said Claude Barberis,
vice president, Medicinal Chemistry at Cerevel. “The deeper understanding and
insights we will be able to derive could ultimately get treatments for the most
devastating neuroscience diseases onto the market faster, improving the
day-to-day lives of millions of people.”
Multiomics
Suite
Genomic differences can affect susceptibility to certain diseases and
the way that people respond to medicines, and increasing the diversity and pool
of genomic understanding can help realize the potential of precision medicine.
But harnessing the exponential growth in genomic data requires significant
resources that many organizations are not able to support. In addition, there
are high costs associated with acquiring, storing, distributing, and analyzing
genomic data as the volume of data continues to increase, doubling every 7-12
months.
Google Cloud’s Multiomics Suite advances precision medicine care by
transforming multiomics data into insights to advance scientific discoveries.
Organizations can use this solution to streamline and accelerate analysis of
genomic data, design clinical genomics, accelerate personalized medicine, and
interpret genomic data to unlock new discoveries. The solution also provides
structure and processes for researchers and data scientists to collaborate,
saving time on developing net new paths, algorithms, or methods.
What sets the Multiomics Suite apart is that it is cloud agnostic,
allowing organizations to leverage existing investments in multiomics in a
simplified environment. It also offers complete traceability through Vertex AI,
so customers can organize millions of artifacts in their cloud environments.
Finally, it leverages the power of Google Research to transform hundreds of
thousands of files, samples, and records to load variant call format (VCF)
files from Google Cloud Storage into BigQuery for analysis.
“Google Cloud life science customers can benefit from our long
experience in this domain. Vertex AI Pipelines and Datasets features are what
provide this important, complete traceability for advanced experiments,” said
Maniar.
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