Atomwise and Enamine Launch Groundbreaking AI-Powered 10-Billion-Compound Virtual Screening Initiative for Pediatric Cancer Drug Discovery

According to publicly available reports from the World Health Organization, more than 15,000 children and adolescents are diagnosed with cancer each year. The disease predominantly affects minors aged 15 years and younger. Although pediatric cancer is rare, accounting for only 0.5% to 4.6% of all cancer cases, its common types are widely recognized, such as leukemia, lymphoma, and central nervous system tumors.

Currently, there are no highly effective therapeutic drugs or methods for pediatric cancer, and approximately 80% of existing drugs cause long-term adverse effects that compromise children’s health. Therefore, the development of novel oncology drugs tailored for pediatric cancer is urgently needed.

To address this practical challenge, Atomwise recently announced a partnership with Enamine, the world’s largest chemical supplier, to launch an AI-driven virtual drug screening initiative encompassing 10 billion compounds, known as the “10-10 Project.” This initiative aims to significantly accelerate the discovery of safer small-molecule therapeutics for pediatric cancers.

Under this initiative, Atomwise will leverage its pioneering AI technology for structure-based small-molecule drug discovery to screen 10 billion compounds. By effectively harnessing big data and algorithms to simulate the drug development process and evaluate the binding of potential compounds to cancer target proteins, the company aims to identify new candidate drugs for pediatric cancers while also predicting their efficacy, thereby helping pharmaceutical manufacturers reduce R&D costs. It is precisely due to Atomwise’s leading AI screening capabilities that Eli Lilly and Company recently extended an olive branch, entering into a multi-year long-term collaboration agreement to support the development of clinical-stage drugs.

As the world’s largest supplier of chemicals, Enamine will leverage its advantage as a global top-tier database provider in this initiative by offering a readily accessible virtual chemical database comprising 10 billion compounds. This resource greatly facilitates new drug discovery and provides researchers with an expanded array of starting points for drug development.

This initiative will maximize the potential for developing novel targeted drugs to inhibit cancer growth and metastasis, while also enabling lead optimization and toxicity testing to enhance drug safety. Meanwhile, researchers will no longer need to manually and repeatedly screen the same set of compounds; instead, they will leverage computational technologies to more efficiently test a vast array of diverse compounds, thereby facilitating the early identification of solutions to potential obstacles in drug development.

This initiative aims to enhance success rates, raise the bar for success and progress at every stage of drug development, and shorten the time required for preclinical drug discovery. We believe that the results of the collaboration between Atomwise and Enamine will soon be made public, and we look forward to the outstanding achievements of artificial intelligence.

References:

[1] Atomwise and Enamine to Advance Pediatric Oncology with the World’s First and Largest Ten Billion Compound Virtual Screen