SK Biopharm develops drug design platform using artificial intelligence

SK Biopharm develops drug design platform using artificial intelligence. October. 16, 2018 08:01. by Seong-Ho Hwang hsh0330@donga.com.
SK Biopharmaceuticals has become the first pharmaceutical company in Korea to develop a drug design platform that designs and proposes new compounds using artificial intelligence (AI).

The South Korean pharmaceutical company announced on Monday that it completed the development of its “drug design platform” and has already applied it to drug discovery. The platform is capable of predicting the properties of drugs, analyzing how drugs work inside the body. Based on this prediction function, the platform creates new compounds and designs drugs by studying the properties of drugs.

“The ability to predict the properties of drugs has been in use across the industry, but the ability to design a drug is a first,” said an official from the company. “We will be able to obtain a patent on the new compounds created by the platform.”

The newly developed platform is also capable of machine learning, gathering the data created during the research process. Researchers are also provided with the data in their drug development process.

SK Biopharmaceuticals expects that the new platform will shorten the drug development period, which usually takes over 10 years on average. “We expect our AI-powered platform to reduce the risk of failure in drug discovery process, thereby reducing the time and cost,” an SK Biopharmaceuticals official said.