Taipei News, June 6, 2019 -- Insilico Medicine, one of the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies in the field of deep learning for drug discovery, hosted an online AI competition, MolHack 2019, in Taiwan from February 25th to March 31st. With a focus on "Deep Learning for Small Molecule Generation", the event attracted top teams in deep learning and biochemistry from around the world. Insilico is now thrilled to announce the winner of the intellectual contest: Dr. Vincent Lunot, has got the first prize landing on top of a talent list to be recruited as a possible member of Insilico Taiwan's R&D team and taking back home a 15" MacBook Pro.
Traditional drug discovery efforts take years to develop new pharmaceuticals. Insilico Medicine aims to drastically shorten this time period by applying deep learning techniques. The most important aspect of deep learning AI drug discovery methods is the ability to design novel molecular structures with specific characteristics of interest. As a practical example, one may be interested in generating molecules with fingerprints (e.g. Molecular ACCess System, MACCS, fingerprint) which are similar to the desired fingerprint since some of the characteristics of a molecule may be encoded in its fingerprint.
The total number of 65 participants registered for MolHack 2019 competition and tried their best to succeed in the main contest: to design and train Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), conditioned on molecular fingerprints, in order to generate similar new molecules based on the target MACCS fingerprints. In addition to the first prize won by Dr. Vincent Lunot, Yu Teng Tung, the second place winner, and Tsai-Min Chen and Chih-Han Huang, the third place winners, were awarded nVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 GPUs. Moreover, the three other contestants, Yu-Hsiang Huang, Chung Chen Chang, and Arash Keshavarzi Arshadi, were given special prizes for the excellent innovative solutions they came up with.
According to Artur Kadurin, Chief Executive Officer of Insilico Taiwan Ltd., "Deep learning can accelerate the R&D of the medicines against aging and diseases, such as cancer or Alzheimer's. Traditional drug discovery is the long, arduous process of narrowing down millions of chemical compounds into mature drugs, so, the mission of the company is to shorten the time by adopting deep learning techniques."
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For further information, images or interviews, please contact::
Artur Kadurin, CEO of Insilico Taiwan Ltd.
Email: artur@insilico.com
Email: artur@insilico.com
About Insilico Medicine
The expression in silico is an allusion to the commonly used Latin phrases in biology, in vivo, in vitro and in situ, that refer to experiments done inside living organisms, in the lab, or where they are found in nature, respectively. In silico refers to biological experiments that are "performed on silicon, via computer simulation."
Insilico Medicine is located in the Emerging Technology Center of the East Campus of Johns Hopkins University in Rockville, MD USA. It has R&D resource centers in Belgium, Russia, Taiwan, Korea, and the United Kingdom.
Insilico Medicine pioneered applications of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning for the generation of novel molecular structures for diseases with both a known target and with no known targets. It is a pioneer in the use of deep learning to assist the generation of novel molecular structures with desired characteristics. Insilico Medicine is committed to using deep learning techniques to help shorten drug development cycle time and cost and to accelerate the research and development of anti-aging and disease-related drugs.
The company collaborates with pharmaceutical companies worldwide and is pursuing new drug discovery programs in cancer, dermatological diseases, fibrosis, Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's Disease, ALS, diabetes, sarcopenia, and aging.
The company's Smart's Pharma.AI division is currently a collaborative research and development partner for biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and skin care manufacturers worldwide, and provides advanced artificial intelligence learning services to many governments and foundations.
In 2017, Nvidia named Insilico Medicine as one of the Top 5 AI companies for social impact potential. In 2018, CB Insights listed the company among its global top 100 AI companies. In 2018 it received the Frost & Sullivan 2018 North American Artificial Intelligence for Aging Research and Drug Development Award accompanied by an industry brief.
Brief company video: https:/
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