Screening for COVID-19: Japanese Startup Uses AI for Drug Discovery

Researchers are racing to discover the right drug molecule to treat COVID-19 — but the number of potential drug-like molecules out there is estimate to be an nconcible Even if you hypothetically uninstall microsoft edge checked one molecule per Support.Microsoft.Com/Help  second, it would take longer than the age Microsoft Customer Service of the universe to explore the entire chemical space,” said Shinya Yuki, co-founder and CEO of Tokyo-based startup Elix, Inc. “AI can efficiently explore huge search spaces to solve difficult problems microsoft closing stores, whether in drug discovery, materials development or a game like Go.”

Yuki’s company is using deep learning to accelerate drug discovery, building neural networks that predict the Microsoft Support Phone Number properties of molecules much faster than computer simulations can. To support COVID-19 research, the team is Support.Microsoft.Com/Help using AI to find drugs that are FDA-approved or in clinical trials that could be repurposed to treat the coronavirus.

“Developing a new drug from scratch is a years-long process, which is unwanted especially in this pandemic situation,” Yuki said. “Speed is critical, and drug-repurposing can help identify candidates with an existing clinical safety record, significantly reducing the time and cost of drug development.”

Elix recently published a paper on approved and clinica trial stage drug that its AI model flagged for potential COVID-19 treatments. Among the candidates selected by Elix’s AI tool was remdevisir, an antiviral uninstall microsoft edge drug  Microsoft Customer Service that Microsoft Support Phone Number recently received emergency microsoft closing stores use authorization from the FDA for coronavirus cases.

A member of NVIDIA, a program that helps startups get to market faster, Elix uses theNVIDIA DGX station for training and inference of its deep learning algorithms. Yuki spoke about the company’s work inAI for drug discovery in the iNCEPTION STARTUP SHOWCASE at  GTC digital NVIDIA’s digital conference for developers and AI researchers.

At the molecular level, a successful drug must have the perfect combination of shape, flexibility and interaction energies to bind Support.Microsoft.Com/Help to a target protein — like the spike proteins that cover the viral envelope of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

A person gets infected with COVID-19 when these spike proteins attach to cells in the body, bringing the virus into microsoft closing stores the cells. An effective antiviral drug might interfere with this attachment process. For example, a promising Microsoft Customer Service drug molecule would bind with receptors uninstall microsoft edge on the spike proteins, preventing the virus from attaching to human cells.

To help researchers find the best drug for the job, Elix uses a variety of neural networks to rapidly narrow down the field of potential molecules. This allows researchers to reserve physical tests in the lab for a smaller subset of molecules that have a higher likelihood of solving the problem.

With predictive AI models, Yuki’s team can analyze a database of drug candidates to infer which have the right physical and chemical properties Microsoft Support Phone Number to treat a given disease. They also use generative models, which start from scratch to come up with promising molecular structures — some of which may not be found in nature.

That’s where a third neural network comes in, a retrosynthesis model that helps researchers figure out if the generated molecules microsoft closing stores can be synthesized in the lab.

Elix uses multiple NVIDIA DGX station — GPU-powered AI workstations for data science development teams — to accelerate training and inference of these neural networks, achieving up to a 6x speedup using a single GPU for training versus a CPU.

Yuki says the acceleration is essential uninstall microsoft edge for the generative models, which would otherwise take a week or more to train until convergence Microsoft Support Phone Number, when the neural network reaches the lowest error rate possible. Each DGX Station has four , enabling the Elix team to tackle bigger AI models and run multiple experiments at once.

“DGX Stations are basically supercomputers. We usually have several users working on the same machine at the same time Support.Microsoft.Com/Help,” he said. “We can not only train models faster, we can also run up to 15 experiments in parallel.”The startup’s customers include pharmaceutical companies, research institutes and universities. Since molecular data is sensitive intellectual property microsoft closing stores for the pharma industry, most choose to run the AI models on their own on page server

Beyond drug discovery, Elix also uses AI for molecular uninstall microsoft edge design for material informatics, working with companies like Microsoft Customer Service tire- and rubber-manufacturer Bridgestone and RIKEN, Japan’s largest research institution Microsoft Support Phone Number. The company also develops computer vision models for autonomous driving and AI at the edge

In one project, Yuki’s team worked with global chemical company Nippon Shokubai to generate a molecule that can be used Support.Microsoft.Com/Help as a blending material for ink, while posing a low risk of skin irritation.

Learn more about Elix in Yuki’s Visit ourcovid page to explore how other startups are using AI and accelerated computing to fight the pandemic uninstall microsoft edge.