Blog

On the 6th March AI3SD teamed up with the Medicines Discovery catapult to run a workshop at Alderley Park Conference Centre on AI in Drug Discovery & Drug Safety. This was a very well received event, there was a strong industry presence among the attendees and several representatives from different Universities. There were four keynote talks and working group discussions on topics that were elicited from initial open discussions after the presentations.

The Keynote speakers were:

• Professor John Overington, Medicines Discovery Catapult: Introducing MDC & their work on AI in Drug Discovery
• Professor Val Gillet, University of Sheffield: Using Machine Learning to Drive Reaction Based De Novo Design
• Dr Willem van Hoorn, ExScientia: Re-energising Small Molecule Drug Discovery
• Dr Nicola Richmond, GlaxoSmithKline: Understanding the holes in the metabolome

The key themes identified for working group topics were:

• Skills and training
• Data Quality / Access / Collation / Reproducibility
• Data Sharing / Interdisciplinary data – data interoperability
• Optimisation of Drug Discovery Process
• Explainable AI / Models
• Data Decisions & ML Trustworthiness

The slides are not available for sharing, but Dr Wendy Warr has written a very detailed formal report of the event capturing the main details of each presentation and it can be found here: https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/432067/.