Biomedical Data Science Seminar Series, BRB Gaulton Auditorium,

Title: Generative AI for Drug Discovery

This week hosted by DBEI Informatics Division – invited by Li Shen, PhD

Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) for drug discovery has been going far beyond predictive analysis over existing drug candidates. The recent, cutting-edge generative AI enables tramendous opportunities to generate new drug structures and peptide sequences that may not exist but exhibit better properties than any existing ones. In this talk, I will demonstrate three studies on generative AI to 1) generate new small-molecule drug candidates; 2) identify synthetic paths for any (generated) small molecules and 3) generate new binding peptide sequences for MHC Class I proteins. I will present our work using auto-encoder-based deep learning, graph neural networks and deep reinforcement learning for the three studies. Overall, I will show how generative AI can help drug discovery that cannot be achieved using conventional methods.

Bio: Dr. Xia Ning is an Associate Professor in the Biomedical Informatics Department (BMI), and the Computer Science and Engineering Department, The Ohio State University. She is the Vice Chair for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at BMI, and recently appointed as the Section Chief of AI, Clinical Informatics and Impelmentation Science at BMI, and the Associate Director of Biomedical Informatics at OSU Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS). She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in 2012. Ning’s research is on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning with applications in drug discovery, health care and e-commerce. Specific applications include new molecule generation and drug candidate prioritization for drug discovery, drug repurposing for Alzheimer’s disease, cancer drug selection for precision medicine, information retrieval from electronic medical records (EMRs), and EMR analysis. Ning won the 10-Years-Highest-Impact-Paper Award, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) in 2020. Ning is a Fellow of American Medical Informatics Association