Drug Design Education and Innovation

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are becoming increasingly important for both basic and translational chemistry research. The Advanced Learning for Innovative Drug Discovery (AIDD) project, a new initiative based at the Helmholtz Zentrum München in Germany and funded by the European Union, will train PhD students in translational research for drug discovery and chemoinformatics.  Prof. Hanoch Senderowitz, a leading expert in this expanding field from Bar-Ilan University, will take part in this novel project.

The AIDD project will bring together fifteen institutions from Europe and Canada to train PhD students in close collaboration with partners from Israel, the United States, Australia, China, and other countries. The aim of the new network is to prepare a future generation of scientists with outstanding skills in both machine learning and chemistry to innovate drug research.

Prof. Senderowitz, who heads the molecular modeling, computer-aided drug design and chemoinformatics lab at Bar-Ilan University, will be involved as an associate partner in the AIDD project, delivering talks within the framework of the project's training schools about his work using machine learning in drug design and materials informatics. Senderowitz, Chairman of the University's Department of Chemistry, focuses on the development and application of new computational methods for the design of new and improved drugs and materials through interdisciplinary research combining chemistry, biology and computer science. Such methods could potentially provide a timely response to rapidly emerging epidemic threats.

"The project combines theoretical expertise with access to valuable proprietary data and the expertise of the industrial partners in medicinal and synthetic chemistry and will thus contribute innovative AI methods.  Another main focus of AIDD is to train the next generation of researchers in interdisciplinary drug discovery and thus make a valuable contribution to future research in Europe," said project coordinator Igor Tetko.