Several authors are in Insilico Medicine[1], which uses AI for drug discovery and has one product in clinical trials if I remember correctly.
AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor
11–20 of 72 posts
Re: AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor
#12For people who know about this area: How far away is something like this from an actual treatment? I assume its pretty far, but is it the sort of thing where you basically have to test to see if it works and is safe-ish? Or are a lot more steps involved? What does promising in this context mean? Like is it the sort of thing that has a 50% chance of eventually being useful, or is it more like 1% chance? Regardless exc…
Very, very, very far away. This paper is about target selection and hit identification, the very first steps of the pipeline. What follows is Backbone optimization (tweaking the chemistry, and figuring out how to actually produce it), pre-clinical trials (in cells and later in animals), and should those prove successful (fairly unlikely in general), then we'll have clinical phases 1-3. Each of those will take several years. Most candidate drugs that even manage to come to clinical trials will fail there (i forgot the exact numbers, but far over 95%). In general: this research is at the stage of someone coming to a software engineer with the words "I have an idea about an app". The actual work hasn't really started yet, and most likely this won't work at all.
Should this molecule be successful (Wich is highly unlikely, as most hit targets aren't) it will probably take an decade until this becomes an experimental treatment, and likely two or more until it becomes a standard treatment.
All in all, this isn't really big news at all, this is a very unexciting thing, and only gets views because it has AlphaFold in the title
(Caveat: it's been a few years since I worked in a remotely related area)
Re: AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor
#13For people who know about this area: How far away is something like this from an actual treatment? I assume its pretty far, but is it the sort of thing where you basically have to test to see if it works and is safe-ish? Or are a lot more steps involved? What does promising in this context mean? Like is it the sort of thing that has a 50% chance of eventually being useful, or is it more like 1% chance? Regardless exc…
This is about as far from actual treatment as you can be. This paper is entirely about the very first step, finding candidate molecules that bind to a specific protein.
Re: AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor
#14Interesting to consider this in light of yesterday's news about the lack of success for IBM Watson in Healthcare.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046432 IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts
Re: AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor
#15For people who know about this area: How far away is something like this from an actual treatment? I assume its pretty far, but is it the sort of thing where you basically have to test to see if it works and is safe-ish? Or are a lot more steps involved? What does promising in this context mean? Like is it the sort of thing that has a 50% chance of eventually being useful, or is it more like 1% chance? Regardless exc…
Very, very, very far away. This paper is about target selection and hit identification, the very first steps of the pipeline. What follows is Backbone optimization (tweaking the chemistry, and figuring out how to actually produce it), pre-clinical trials (in cells and later in animals), and should those prove successful (fairly unlikely in general), then we'll have clinical phases 1-3. Each of those will take several…
I don't think 8.9 uM is a terribly good active concentration for a drug, so there is a lot of work to be done here.
Re: AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor
#16Offtopic: More and more I'm noticing the ever-increasing amount of chinese names in machine learning papers. Can anyone explain that? Are these researchers mainly choosing this field out of their own interest, or is China somehow pushing/sponsoring a lot researchers to pursue this field?
I realise that China is pursusing AI dominance, is that just what we're seeing? Note this is purely curiosity, I have no problems with the Chinese people (CCP is a different story).
Re: AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor
#17Offtopic: More and more I'm noticing the ever-increasing amount of chinese names in machine learning papers. Can anyone explain that? Are these researchers mainly choosing this field out of their own interest, or is China somehow pushing/sponsoring a lot researchers to pursue this field? I realise that China is pursusing AI dominance, is that just what we're seeing? Note this is purely curiosity, I have no problems w…
I don't think there is any big mystery. AI is a hot area, and a reasonable percentage of smart people have Chinese ancestry (regardless of where they reside now).
Re: AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor
#18Offtopic: More and more I'm noticing the ever-increasing amount of chinese names in machine learning papers. Can anyone explain that? Are these researchers mainly choosing this field out of their own interest, or is China somehow pushing/sponsoring a lot researchers to pursue this field? I realise that China is pursusing AI dominance, is that just what we're seeing? Note this is purely curiosity, I have no problems w…
Well first of all, China is a huge country with four times the population of the US or three times of the EU. The greatest "trick" that they have is that they count as one country. It would look different if they were a continent made up of a dozen (still pretty big) countries.
I used to work at a Chinese research institute (in a non ML-field) and the team leader took some time and frequently encouraged his students to learn ML, to try to apply it to their work or just for the sake of it. He was very open about the fact that it would benefit the nation, but that also ML researchers were in good demand and it would be great for the student's individual careers.
So yeah it is mainly just a very popular topic over there, too. But in addition, I feel that China (the gov/party/research community, whoever) thinks more strategically than for example the EU.
Re: AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor
#19Offtopic: More and more I'm noticing the ever-increasing amount of chinese names in machine learning papers. Can anyone explain that? Are these researchers mainly choosing this field out of their own interest, or is China somehow pushing/sponsoring a lot researchers to pursue this field? I realise that China is pursusing AI dominance, is that just what we're seeing? Note this is purely curiosity, I have no problems w…
You should see it more as China finally starting to pull its weight in scientific research.
Their population is 4x that of the US, yet their scientific impact is AFAICT less than that of the US.
Re: AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor
#20Interesting to consider this in light of yesterday's news about the lack of success for IBM Watson in Healthcare. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046432 IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts
Eh, I would argue there is a massive difference between drug discovery and patient care, which was what Watson was aiming for.
Filtering out useful molecules from useless (or dangerous) ones is a nicely contained (if difficult) problem that ML is pretty good at solving.