Powered by Alibaba Cloud the Global Health Drug Discovery Institute (GHDDI) launched a Free AI Virtual Screening Service for COVID-19 in order to facilitate COVID-19 drug discovery effort globally. The free and web-based research engine provides researchers with an AI-powered tool for virtual screening computation, that is powerful enough to support the prediction of SARS-CoV2 relevant target binding and phenotypic properties of any queried compound with just one click. Alibaba Cloud’s high-performance computing (HPC) resources and GHDDI’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities accelerate the computation process exponentially.
GHDDI’s drug repurposing research has put the Institute at the forefront in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the launch of the GHDDI COVID-19 information sharing portal hosted on Alibaba Cloud in January 2020, GHDDI has received 130 research applications worldwide, and partnered with 10 research institutions to investigate 9255 antiviral substances, 256 anti-coronavirus active small molecules and biological agents, and 18 high potential drug candidates recommended by AI through data mining from historical records.
Wet lab experiments were soon followed using AI shortlisted high potential compounds, and compounds with significant inhibitory effects on SARS-CoV2 in vitro were constantly being discovered by researchers. The portal also provides real-time statistical analysis of COVID-19 global research progress, with daily automatic updates, powered by a natural language processing AI engine. This AI engine can generate a report that covers over 1000 current worldwide clinical trials of 840 small molecule drugs, 306 biologics and 84 vaccines (as of 7/25/2020) against COVID-19 and hundreds of anti-SARS-CoV2 active compounds from in vitro experiments by research groups from all over the world.
Supercomputers have tens of thousands of processors that work together to perform large scale computations, which normally would take decades if done manually. Powered by the 7th Generation of Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Alibaba Cloud’s HPC is highly scalable and elastic, and can be deployed over the cloud quickly without any infrastructure investment.
