AI researchers asked to contribute to new platform designed to boost drug discovery

Insilico Medicine, a Maryland-based AI company, is asking researchers to contribute to its new platform aimed at boosting AI-powered drug discovery.

“We believe that it is important to develop a set of standards and benchmarks to help the community, to accelerate the delivery of AI-generated drugs to the patients," Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, founder and chief executive officer of Insilico Medicine, said in a prepared statement.

The company is asking AI researchers and teams to contribute their datasets and models to help extend its new Molecular Sets (MOSES) platform. MOSES, a benchmarking platform for molecular generation models, collects various machine-learning techniques and compares them on a standard dataset.

The hope is that the platform will increase the pace of drug discovering, while also facilitating the sharing and comparison of new models, according to the release.

"At Insilico Medicine, we take reproducibility and fair evaluation of machine learning models very seriously. Growing popularity of generative AI applications in drug discovery dictates a need for a standardized benchmarking platform supported and maintained by the research community,” Alexander Zhebrak, chief technology officer of Insilico Medicine, said in a statement. “With MOSES, we come one step closer to the ultimate goal of disrupting the industry with better drug compounds produced by advanced computational and machine learning methods.”

Drug discovery is an area of the healthcare IT market that's expected to be greatly impacted thanks to AI and machine learning. According to a recent report, "AI and machine learning will further evolve human and machine interaction" throughout 2019 and "more specifically, AI will begin to see fruition, particularly in the imaging diagnostic, drug discovery and risk analytics applications."

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Danielle covers Clinical Innovation & Technology as a senior news writer for TriMed Media. Previously, she worked as a news reporter in northeast Missouri and earned a journalism degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She's also a huge fan of the Chicago Cubs, Bears and Bulls. 

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