People around the world are set to benefit from new breakthroughs in AI-driven drug discovery to tackle previously untreatable diseases and transforming patient outcomes using British AI and research expertise. The government has announced a new project, the OpenBind consortium, to make the UK a leader in AI-drug discovery, as Imperial College announces it will partner with the World Economic Forum to deliver an AI-Driven Innovation Centre.
The OpenBind consortium will use breakthrough experimental technology to generate the world’s largest collection of data on how drugs interact with proteins, the building blocks of the body. This will be twenty times greater than anything collected over the last fifty years – cementing the UK’s position as a global hub for AI-driven drug discovery. The consortium, backed with up to £8 million of investment from the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology’s (DSIT) newly established Sovereign AI Unit, will be led by some of the world’s leading scientific minds including Professor Charlotte Deane at the University of Oxford, Professor Frank von Delft at Diamond Light Source and the University of Oxford, and David Baker, Chemistry Nobel Prize winner and head of the Institute for Protein Design at Washington University.
Based at Diamond Light Source – the UK’s national synchrotron facility at the Harwell Science Campus in Oxfordshire – the consortium will close critical data gaps, driving breakthroughs in healthcare which will unlock new avenues for drugs that can treat and beat diseases, as well as helping scientists harness the transformative potential of engineering biology to face down a range of other issues, such as designing new enzymes to tackle plastic waste.
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