Najat Khan: Lots of buzz about the future of drug discovery

Najat Khan, Chief Data Science Officer & SVP/Global Head at Johnson & Johnson, made the following post on LinkedIn:

“Lots of buzz about the future of drug discovery! The past few weeks saw the release of next-generation models developed by the community to predict the 3D structure of proteins and ligands, simultaneously, yielding significant increase in 3D accuracy—including RoseTTAFold All-Atom from David Baker’s lab at the Institute for Protein Design, University of Washington and the latest AlphaFold version from Google DeepMind.

Why is this so important? Many diseases are caused by “misfolded” proteins – which behave in ways they shouldn’t, potentially leading to disease. To determine out how to treat a certain disease, we need to understand which proteins are dysregulated and what the misfolds look like – so that we can invent molecules that can bind to those proteins in a way that disrupts the dysregulation. If we can leverage the power of artificial intelligence, generative AI and machine learning to rapidly predict these interactions, we can target our discovery efforts and more rapidly find and advance the most promising molecules into our pipeline.

Taken together with the announcement last month of the landmark proteomic dataset from the UK Biobank – which could help us better understand which proteins are driving complex diseases – this is an extremely exciting time to be in pharmaceutical R&D. At Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, we are excited to continue leveraging the latest advances in science, data science and technology to drive innovation for patients in need.”

Source: Najat Khan/LinkedIn.