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© Diamond Light Source
People around the world are set to benefit from new breakthroughs in AI-driven drug discovery to tackle previously untreatable diseases and transforming patient outcomes using British AI and research expertise.
The UK’s ‘OpenBind’ consortium will use experimental technology to generate the world’s largest collection of data on how drugs interact with proteins, the building blocks of the body. This will be 20 times greater than anything collected over the last 50 years – cementing the UK’s position as a global hub for AI-driven drug discovery.
This will support the training of new AI models that can identify promising new drugs, giving researchers an unparalleled ability to open up new fronts in the fight against disease. Development costs will be slashed by up to £100 billion and spark the innovation and economic growth which underpins the government’s Plan for Change.
Based at Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron facility at the Harwell Science Campus in Oxfordshire, the consortium will work to close critical data gaps. This will drive breakthroughs in healthcare, unlocking new avenues for drugs that can treat and beat diseases, while helping scientists harness the transformative potential of engineering biology to face down other issues like designing new enzymes to tackle plastic waste.
The consortium, backed with up to £8 million of investment from DSIT’s newly established Sovereign AI Unit, will be led by some of the world’s leading scientific minds including Professor Frank von Delft from Diamond and NDM’s Centre for Medicines Discovery, Professor Charlotte Deane from the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford and David Baker, Chemistry Nobel Prize winner and head of the Institute for Protein Design at Washington University.
Read the full story on the Nuffield Department of Medicine website.