Chinese scientists have made a major scientific achievement in the field of pharmaceuticals, or what is known as 'biocomputing,' which relies on using computers in human-related scientific research. Chinese researchers have developed an artificial intelligence-based platform capable of accelerating drug screening processes by up to a million times, according to the website of China Central Television, which noted that this step makes a significant difference in chemical genomics, or the analysis of human DNA codes that contributes to the development and efficiency of the pharmaceutical industry. The platform was developed by a research team from Tsinghua University and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, led by Professor Lan Yannian, within the Joint Center for Health Computing at the university's Institute of Artificial Intelligence Research, in cooperation with the academy. The results of the study were published in the scientific journal 'Science' in January of this year. The goal of chemical genomics research is to identify potential drugs by screening about 20,000 proteins in DNA, 90% of which are associated with diseases. These researches aim to bring the vast majority of these proteins within the scope of pharmaceutical development, which has remained outside it due to huge technical and computational limitations. Traditional virtual screening methods cannot handle this massive amount of data, as screening the entire genome using current tools would take hundreds of years.
