Machine Learning in Drug Discovery

Department of Statistics

Graduate Lecture - Thursday 3rd June 2021, with Dr Fergus Boyles. Department of Statistics, University of Oxford. Drug discovery is a long and laborious process, with ever growing costs and dwindling productivity making it ever more difficult to bring new medicines to the market in an affordable and timely fashion. There is a long history of applying statistical modelling and machine learning to problems in drug discovery, and, as in many fields, there is growing excitement about the potential of modern machine learning techniques to both automate and accelerate time-consuming tasks, and to enable previously unfeasible experiments. In this talk I will describe the drug discovery pipeline and introduce computer-aided drug discovery. Drawing on my own research and that of others, I will explain how machine learning is currently being applied to problems in drug discovery and highlight challenges and pitfalls that remain to be addressed.