Stanford professor Michael Levitt, PhD, a member of Insilico Medicine's Scientific Advisory Board, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2013 for his groundbreaking work in protein structure and protein folding using computer modeling. In this lecture, Dr. Levitt describes how the work he began over 50 years ago has been vastly improved and expanded through the massive increase in computer speed and incredible advances in machine learning. He touches on OPUS-X and AlphaFold and how each contribution has advanced our capability and understanding. Now, says Dr. Levitt, Insilico Medicine is using AI to create an entirely new AI-driven drug discovery pipeline from A to Z. Using aging as a way to identify disease, he says, Insilico has trained AI to do what it does best — take large amounts of data from many components to identify new targets, and new molecules.
"Uncertainty is a good thing," Levitt says. "By combining data with clever filtering we get certainty and options from uncertainty." Dr. Levitt sees massive possibilities ahead. "The protein-folding problem that was a very difficult problem for 50 years, and drug design, are all being dealt with in this global, all-encompassing way," he says. "And I am personally very, very optimistic."