University of Ottawa

Purpose

Designing a drug to treat a specific disease type is a highly challenging exercise due to breadth of the molecular search space and having a limited understanding about many diseases of interest. The successful discovery of a medicine for a target disease (gene/protein/pathway) usually takes many years and is associated with a very significant investment by private pharmaceutical organization, which in turn tends to result in an unaffordable price of medicines in the Canadian and global markets. The emergence of significant biochemical and high-throughput genomic data acquisition techniques and the rise of advanced artificial intelligence paradigms provides an unprecedented opportunity for automatic design of new drugs at a much faster pace and at a much lower cost, igniting hopes to discover drugs for diseases where no medicines currently exist. In this project researchers will aim to develop a data and AI-driven drug design platform/pipeline for precise and effective treatment of cancers and complex diseases.