This is a single newsletter for both September and October of 2022.

• Please come to the Pistoia Alliance Fall Annual Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, on November 1st and 2nd. We will be presenting on both days. In the morning of November 1 we will report on the Assay Annotation and the Good Machine Learning Practices (GMLP) initiatives. In the afternoon of November 2 we host a breakout in the AI Emergent Technology. We plan three short talks followed by a panel Q&A. Our speakers on November 2 are:
  • John Overington, Exscientia, “Machine Learning approaches to data discovery and curation”
  • Bikalpa Neupane, Takeda, “Emergent technologies in pharmaceutical enterprise for better ROI”
  • A team from Roche and Pangea Data: Michael Wu, Jingqing Zhang, and Vibhor Gupta, “Table to text Natural Language Generation”
• A quick update from the Assay Annotation project (a.k.a. “DataFAIRy”): we are starting a new round of annotations with two objectives. The first objective is a significant scale-up in operations, from about 500 assay protocols in the POC stage to the current target of 5,000. We already identified about two thousand assay protocols for this phase and are actively working on picking more, which is our second objective: to identify assay protocols that are important for our members. In addition, we are aligning the assay selection with the emergent Pistoia Alliance – US FDA In-Vitro Pharmacology working group. We would also like to announce that Molecular Connections Pvt. Ltd. was chosen as the provider of data curation services for the DataFAIRy project in an open and fair competitive bidding, and that the Molecular Connections colleagues have already started work.

Please do not forget about our other upcoming events:

• Register for the new AI CoE webinar “Generative Therapeutics Design: Accelerating Drug Discovery with AI and Machine Learning” scheduled for October 19, 4 PM BST (11 AM EDT / 8 AM PDT). The application of AI and ML methods in drug discovery are maturing and their utility and impact are likely to permeate many aspects of drug discovery. Numerous methods, however, utilize structure-activity relationship (SAR) data without explicit use of 3D structural information of the ligand protein complex. Gilead is using BIOVIA’s Generative Therapeutics Design solution (GTD) to take advantage of 3D structural models, i.e. pharmacophoric representation of ligand protein interaction as well as typical docking/scoring steps. Using Gilead’s SAR data set pertaining to the discovery of spleen tyrosine kinase (SYK) inhibitors Entospletinib and Lanraplenib they found that common types of problems in medicinal chemistry can be effectively addressed with Generative Therapeutics Design.
• Register for the new webinar “Improving Efficiency in Life Sciences R&D: AI/ML in R&D Automation”, October 12, 5 PM BST (Noon EST / 9 AM PST). This is a webinar in a series of three related events. Learn how innovative science and technology are disrupting and transforming the way R&D is being conducted in a number of forward-thinking life science organizations.

Last but not the least, we’d like to alert our members that the funding for the Pistoia Alliance AI community will be running out at the end of this year. If you like what we do, or if you’d like to propose something new, and have an ability to invest in Pistoia Alliance projects this year, please consider our community as a potential recipient.

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Community is a great example of the value the Pistoia Alliance delivers to its members. There has never been a more important time to collaborate as an industry, and we hope you find our CoE inspiring and informative.  If you would like to find out more about the benefits of Pistoia Alliance membership and how you can get involved with all the different initiatives we run, please send an email to Membership@PistoiaAlliance.org.