Google Cloud Launches AI Solutions for Drug Discovery, Precision Medicine

Google Cloud announced the launch of two new artificial intelligence (AI)-based life sciences solutions to accelerate drug discovery and precision medicine for pharmaceutical firms, biotech companies, and other stakeholders, according to a press release shared with HealthITAnalytics.

The Target & Lead Identification Suite is designed to help research teams more effectively identify amino acid function and predict protein structure to drive efficiencies for in silico drug design. The Multiomics Suite serves to assist researchers with the interpretation of genomic and multiomics data in an effort to advance precision medicine treatments.

“We've long been involved with creating new tools for understanding and working with the code of life, like high performance computing for genomic analytics, and artificial intelligence that can predict three-dimensional models of proteins,” said Shweta Maniar, global director, Life Sciences Strategy and Solutions, Google Cloud, in the press release. “These new solutions launching today can transform life sciences organizations by accelerating drug discovery and bringing therapeutics to market faster. When patients are waiting for that life-saving treatment in cancer care or that quality-of-life medicine for migraine headaches, this faster time-to-market can have an incredibly positive impact on lives.”

The Target and Lead Identification Suite includes data ingestion, target identification, and lead identification capabilities to support drug discovery pipelines. The target identification function also has the potential to help stakeholders assess the function of amino acid mutagenesis, predict antibody structures, or accelerate de novo protein design, according to the press release.

The Multiomics Suite also includes data ingestion, in addition to secondary and tertiary analysis functions to advance clinical genomics and precision medicine. The tool is designed to reduce the time and costs associated with acquiring, storing, sharing, and analyzing genomic and multiomics data.

Early adopters of the solutions include Pfizer, Cerevel, and Colossal BioSciences.

A blog post written by Maniar and shared with HealthITAnalytics alongside the press release indicates that the Target and Lead Identification Suite and the Multiomics Suite are part of Google Cloud’s strategy to advance life sciences through generative AI.

Last month, Google shared progress on a number of its health-related generative AI initiatives.

One of the major announcements the company made was that Med-PaLM 2, a version of Google’s original Pathways Language Model (PaLM) tuned for the medical domain, would be made available to select customers for limited testing.

Throughout testing, users will provide feedback on the tool and its potential healthcare use cases, such summarizing clinical documentation, pulling insights from unstructured data, and answering complex medical questions.