Use AI to speed drug development and

Physicist Professor Aleksandr Tkachenko of the University of Luxembourg has received a “proof of concept” grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for his project “MACHINE-DRUG”. This project aims to discover ideal pharmaceutical formulations with proprietary machine learning. The project could accelerate the drug formulation process 100 times faster than he did, making it safer, cheaper and faster to bring new drugs to market.

Innovative technologies developed in the “MACHINE-DRUG” project in the fields of machine learning, complex materials for pharmaceutical applications (molecular crystals), quantum mechanics and high-performance computing (HPC) can be applied in many fields. there is a possibility. It can be applied to fields such as the food industry, pesticides, and organic energy materials.

Over the past decade, Professor Alexander Tkachenko and his research team have developed machine learning methods and new conceptual tools based on quantum and statistical mechanics to study systems containing thousands of atoms. His group has already demonstrated a new computational method to predict the crystal structure of rotigotine, an FDA-approved drug for Parkinson’s disease and restless leg disease, without any experimental data.

Since Professor Tkachenko arrived in Luxembourg in 2015, his team has raised over €10 million in competitive funding from the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), the ERC, the University of Luxembourg Institute for Advanced Study, and collaborative projects. We work with industry partners such as Google, Janssen Pharma, AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim.

ERC grants are designed to support outstanding scientists and academics from all disciplines who are recognized for their research achievements and who are already in their career stages as established research leaders. This is the second proof-of-concept grant awarded to Prof. Tkachenko and the University of Luxembourg, and the fifth flagship grant awarded to Prof. Tkachenko from the ERC. As Head of the Department of Physics and Materials Science and Professor of Theoretical Chemical Physics at the Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine, his outstanding contributions to advancing the state of the art in molecular modeling were previously awarded by a grant starting in 2011. Approved. In 2017 he will be awarded a Consolidator Grant, in 2020 he will be awarded a Proof of Concept grant and in 2022 an Advanced Grant.