O03_02
Digital Transformation on Small Molecule Optimization Research at Astellas Pharma
Mori KENICHI *1, Kenji NEGORO2
1Modality Informatics, ResearchX, DigitalX, Astellas Pharma Inc.
2Platform Sciences & Modalities, Discovery Intelligence, Applied Research & Operations, Astellas Pharma Inc.
( * E-mail: kenichi-mori@astellas.com)
Astellas Pharma has been developing a digital transformation platform to accelerate and improve the quality of the Design-Make-Test-Analysis cycle in lead compound optimization in the small molecule drug discovery research process, including the introduction of AI and robots, to enable researchers to advance their research more efficiently, since the end of 2019. In addition to developing the platform, we have also been engaged in various activities to enable researchers to use this platform daily in their research projects. As a result, we have reached a phase where almost all medicinal chemistry researchers involved in synthesis in drug discovery research projects are using the platform. Furthermore, various success cases have been observed in actual drug discovery research use cases. On the other hand, we have also seen challenges especially in the prediction and compound design with three-dimensional structures. Therefore, we try to solve these challenges by making the most of the opportunities of recent technological innovations in the field of generative AI and a GPU supercomputer. In this presentation, we will introduce our efforts in digital transformation of drug discovery research, particularly focusing on small molecule modalities, related activities and success cases, challenges, and efforts to solve problems using cutting-edge technologies.