Original title: Tencent Announces Entry into AI Drug Research and Development: Helping Overcome Diseases That Can't Be Treated
According to relevant statistics, traditional medicine research and development takes time and effort,It usually takes more than 15 years and costs more than 3 billion US dollars, but only a dozen original innovative drugs are marketed every year. Currently, 90% of the more than 4,000 known diseases have no cure.
Today,Tencent officially announced that it is entering AI drug research and development to help overcome diseases that have no cure. To this end, Tencent released the first AI-driven drug discovery platform, “iDrug (iDrug),” which aims to help users drastically reduce the time and cost of searching for potentially active drugs.
Why is it called “deep clouds”? Tencent said that this is “only in the mountains, deep in the clouds, unknown” originating from the Tang poem “Hidden Seekers Never Encounter”. This is exactly how the new drug was discovered.
According to Tencent, the formation of disease consists of many substances, which eventually form the key protein of the disease, so let's target it. By solving the target, it is possible to solve the disease.
To solve the target, we need to know its protein structure, and then find the corresponding drug to break it.
Well, let's compare a protein involved in the key pathways of this disease to an exquisite lock. If you close this lock, it will cause illness, and if you open it, it will be released.(Understand the structure of the key protein, design drug molecules to inhibit its function, and the disease will be lifted) How did everyone unlock (pharmaceuticals) before AI helped pharmaceuticals?
Yu Open Lock Style - Every day I make a lot of keys to try, and I believe one day I'll open this lock.
If I can't open it, my son will try it; if my son doesn't open, my grandson will try it... As long as my grandparents keep trying for generations, I will definitely be able to unlock this lock.
However, Yu Gong is OK; human life is not OK.If you can't open it, it will make people sick and take countless lives. Therefore, in the past, finding effective drugs targeting disease targets through experiments was often difficult, lengthy, and expensive.
Now we're trying to use AI to help humans and replace physical objects with virtual ones. Judging from industry cases that have entered clinical trials, in new drug development, AI technology can shorten the new drug discovery cycle from 3-6 years to 6 months to 1 year as quickly as possible; from a technical perspective, the Yunshen Smart Drug Platform also has similar capabilities. It can simulate the structure of a lock in the fastest time.
Combining the protein structure and protein function (protein folding) predicted by the AI deep learning model, it is possible to design a drug molecule in a targeted manner to inhibit its function and block disease pathways.
The Yunshen Zhiyao platform can not only design or select suitable candidate keys according to the type and shape of the lock, but also absorb other people's unlocking experience, which can greatly save human and material resources.
Yunshen Zhiyao is Tencent's first product to use AI technology to power drug discovery.The various functional modules and molecular databases on the platform will continue to be iterated; more drug discovery function modules and analytical functions will also be opened and launched one after another.
At present, a number of pharmaceutical companies have reached cooperation to apply the AI model to actual drug development projects.
Tencent said that in the future, it will continue to promote the deep integration of technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data with drug research and development needs, empower the industry with advanced technical capabilities, and promote the rapid development of China's drug research and development capabilities.