<story><title>The Quant King, the Drug Hunter, and the Quest to Unlock New Cures</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-12/a-quant-king-and-a-drug-hunter-join-in-a-quest-to-find-new-cures</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>arandr0x</author><text>For this stage of drug discovery (finding potential hits off of ligand databases, finding potential targets, and refining ligands in silico without running real high-throughput lab work) machine learning may work better at lesser cost. It&amp;#x27;s the direction (some) research is going right now.&lt;p&gt;Of course the real cost of drug development is running clinical trials, and losing something like 90% of ligands because they don&amp;#x27;t make it into the bloodstream, can&amp;#x27;t be synthesized at scale, or wind up having no efficacy in vivo for no reason anyone can fathom.&lt;p&gt;(Even making &amp;quot;copycat drugs&amp;quot; where you pick a known target, known ligand class, and try to minimally alter the synthesis process to get a newly-patentable product can sometimes have odd surprises, including the kind of odd surprise where being more specific to the identified target leads to diminished efficacy.)&lt;p&gt;This goes to show that fundamental research in biochemistry is still needed and we are nowhere near having &amp;quot;cracked the code&amp;quot;, genomics notwithstanding.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Quant King, the Drug Hunter, and the Quest to Unlock New Cures</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-12/a-quant-king-and-a-drug-hunter-join-in-a-quest-to-find-new-cures</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Tehchops</author><text>I see you there, Ubuntu desktop :)&lt;p&gt;Interesting he&amp;#x27;s using a mbp box as a monitor stand.&lt;p&gt;On to a more serious note: is this kind of computing work sped up with GPUs?</text></comment>