AI-Powered Drug Discovery Public Course Launched: NVIDIA Data Scientist Live Session on Accelerating Drug R&D with Clara Discovery

According to Nature, the development of a new drug costs approximately $2.6 billion, takes about 10 years, and has a success rate of less than 1 in 10. During the drug discovery process, research teams typically need to perform molecular dynamics simulations on hundreds of thousands of molecules for drug screening. If further investigation into the interactions between different proteins is required, the computational burden becomes astronomical, resulting in significant time and resource consumption, prolonged development cycles, and an extremely high failure rate.

Accelerating the new drug development process and reducing R&D costs have become urgent issues that major pharmaceutical companies need to address.

At the GTC 2020 conference, NVIDIA launched Clara Discovery, a suite of GPU-accelerated computational drug discovery frameworks, applications, and AI models. NVIDIA Clara Discovery can be applied to all stages of drug development, leveraging accelerated computing, AI, and machine learning across multiple domains, including proteomics, microscopy, virtual screening, computational chemistry, visualization, clinical imaging, and natural language processing.

By leveraging Clara Discovery’s pretrained AI models and application-specific frameworks, drug researchers can redefine the next generation of drug discovery processes, including target identification, compound assembly, and drug response profiling.

Furthermore, Clara Discovery has been optimized and tuned for NVIDIA DGX, effectively handling large-scale computational tasks in the medical field. By leveraging the capabilities of imaging, radiology, and genomics, it enhances the efficiency of AI application development.

On April 9, Zhidx Open Course launched an open course on AI-driven drug discovery, featuring NVIDIA Data Scientist Meng Zhang as the keynote speaker, with the topic “Accelerating AI-Driven Drug Discovery with NVIDIA Clara Discovery.”

Instructor Zhang Meng will provide a systematic overview of the challenges in drug development, the features of NVIDIA Clara Discovery, its acceleration of the drug development workflow, the application of AI technologies in drug discovery, and the development and deployment of GPU-based AI algorithms for drug research.

This open lecture consists of two segments: a keynote presentation and a Q&A session. The 40-minute keynote will be delivered via live video by Instructor Zhang Meng, followed by a 20-minute Q&A session where the instructor will address attendees’ questions through voice or text.