From groundbreaking advances in the AI and ML field to breakthroughs in life science research, 2022 has been a whirlwind of events in the life sciences x ML space.

This year, protein prediction using ML models was taken to a whole new level when DeepMind’s Alphafold 2 unveiled predicted structures for some 220 million proteins. It covered nearly every protein from known organisms in DNA databases.

Another tech giant, Meta’s ESMFold, raised the bar even higher by using AI to predict the structures of about 600 million proteins from bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms that haven’t been characterized.

On the other end of the spectrum, we witnessed cancer patients treated using CAR-t therapy successfully entering remission, and more recently, researchers even figured out why some cancer patients don’t respond to immunotherapy! What’s more - the complete human genome was finally sequenced! What a year!

Huge strides in the drug discovery space using AI have been made, and a drug developed from scratch using AI entered phase I clinical trials! Overall, it has been a great year for life science researchers and the beneficiaries.

The palpable realization that the marriage of technology with life science research has the potential to transform and accelerate the drug discovery and development process is evident. Sadly, a few Biopharma companies are still lagging behind in adopting the shift toward digital transformation.

At Elucidata, we have been striving hard to enable accelerated time to insights in drug discovery using Polly. I want to take this opportunity to tell you about the good things that happened at Elucidata that have enabled us to be in a position to continuously push the efforts towards bettering AI-driven drug discovery!

The past year has been reflective of what’s going on in the world as a whole. We have made swift strides and grown in leaps and bound. Seen a lot of troughs and crests- raised $16M in funding, signed the 4th big pharma from the top 10 list, and so forth.

Here’s to more learning and bettering drug discovery in the new year! Have a Happy New Year.

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This blog was originally sent on our monthly newsletter Polly Bytes.