Diamond Light Source and the University of Oxford’s Department of Statistics have announced a major new collaboration with £8 million of funding from DSIT.
The OpenBind consortium brings together world-leading AI and domain experts and aims to create an unrivalled database of the interactions between drugs and the proteins in our cells. Over 500,000 of these complex protein-ligand structures will be experimentally validated using Diamond’s high-throughput X-ray crystallography. OpenBind’s ambition is to produce twenty times the amount of data produced in the previous five decades.
The work to produce these structures will begin in the labs at Research Complex, where Diamond’s XChem facility have their crystallization and fragment-discovery base. Warren Thompson, Automation Specialist and Computational Chemist at XChem, explains:
'Over the past five years, Research Complex at Harwell has been instrumental in supporting the development of our automated chemistry platform and algorithmic drug-discovery approaches, generating key data for the conceptualization of OpenBind. With its world-class protein-crystallization, chemistry laboratories, and dedicated support staff, Research Complex will continue to play an essential role in the OpenBind initiative. We are excited to continue this journey with Research Complex to deliver OpenBind's transformative science.'
The project is led by Professor Charlotte Deane at the University of Oxford, Nobel laureate David Baker from the University of Washington, and Professor Frank von Delft from Diamond. This combination of experimental scientists and AI experts is a unique double opportunity, Professor von Delft says:
‘To date, we experimental scientists have generated data as a byproduct of answering our scientific questions, now we combine forces with AI scientists and produce the data their AIs actually need. To do so, we will align several very different types of experiments, harnessing recent dramatic advances, including those we've achieved at Diamond. As this accelerates drug design, we will gain currently unthinkable ways to dissect how diseases work and what to do about them.’
The funding for the project forms part of the UK government’s Sovereign AI plan, aiming to drive scientific breakthroughs with AI developed in the UK. Read the full announcement here.