Artificial Intelligence Designed For Telecommunications Will Speed Up Development Of New Drugs

At this years Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships (euro QSAR) symposium, where the pharmaceutical industry discusses drug design, BTexact Technologies, BTs advanced research and technology business, described how patented telecommunications technology, developed within its intelligent systems laboratory, could help the pharmaceutical industry speed up the development of new drugs.

At this years Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships (euro QSAR) symposium, where the pharmaceutical industry discusses drug design, BTexact Technologies, BTs advanced research and technology business, described how patented telecommunications technology, developed within its intelligent systems laboratory, could help the pharmaceutical industry speed up the development of new drugs.

Discovering effective new medicines is costly, time consuming and requires highly-skilled people. Hence there is a great deal of interest in ways of streamlining the process towards developing marketable drugs. Through its work within the telecoms industry, BTexact has developed expertise that could be used to enable the development of new tools for synthetic chemists and increase the effectiveness of the search for new drugs.

Drug design is an extremely complex process. Synthetic chemists are required to integrate a very large amount of information to achieve a useful drug. They must have access to relevant literature, know which starting compounds are available and what related work has already been carried out, maintain their own expertise in synthetic methods and use the results coming back to them from various trials to decide whether they are on the right track.

BTexacts iPAF (Intelligent Personal Assistant Framework) is a framework devised to rapidly develop systems for delivering the right information to the right person in a timely manner. iPAF technology was initially designed for researchers working in the telecoms industry, but it can also be used to make search and retrieval of any information more efficient thereby allowing highly-skilled people to focus on their core functions.

At euro QSAR, BTexact described how iPAF could be adapted to develop a system to assist chemists in their search for suppliers of compounds used to formulate a drug. The proposed system would be able to search a variety of information sources including internal and external databases, as well as the internet, to answer questions such as: Is a particular compound available? Can it be bought or should it be produced? Who may have it and what quantities are available?

Another way in which technology developed for the telecoms industry has been identified to help chemists by providing a new way of evolving new drugs that could be used as an alternative, or more likely a complement, to traditional drug design methods. Based on a technique called evolutionary computation, algorithms could be developed to rapidly synthesise and test a large number of drug compound combinations that may not have occurred through traditional methods.

Evolutionary computation is a branch of computer science inspired by Darwinian evolution and natural selection. BTexact has extensive expertise in this area, particularly in applying these techniques to telecommunications where, for example, networks are enabled to optimise themselves when faults occur. Evolutionary computation could equally be applied to drug design, where a 'population of compound combinations would be produced, most or all of them not very good at the intended function. These are then allowed to 'breed to produce a new generation of combinations. The better are rewarded with 'children that will breed better and better solutions as time and the generations roll on.

Stewart Davies, BTexacts CEO, said: BTexact has always maintained that its incredible bank of technology patents could have uses well beyond the telecoms industry. In this case, telecoms technology could help develop more powerful tools for synthetic chemists to speed up the drug design cycle and show how really effective evolutionary search can 'design drugs which would simply not be designed by humans.

At BTexact our imagination is driven by the research we undertake for BT and the resulting new technology for the telecoms industry. But it is always very exciting when we can see our technology benefiting unrelated industries in such a meaningful way."

ENDS

About BTexact Technologies

BTexact Technologies, BTs advanced research and technology business, offers expertise and experience in communications technology and e-business, backed by a team of more than 3000 technologists and one of the world's largest communications research and development facilities. As the centre of technical expertise for the BT Group, BTexact has established a record of world-first achievement and of successful delivery of projects, large and small. It has also created an intellectual property portfolio of some 14,000 patents based on almost 2000 inventions, some of which are being converted into valuable new businesses by BTexact's Brightstar incubator.

BTexact helps businesses and organisations inside and outside BT Group gain maximum advantage from communications technology. It creates value and competitive advantage by combining a deep knowledge of networks and networked applications with proven skills in business consulting, change management and innovation. Its services are focused to help customers assess the value and performance of communication technologies and systems, identify potential risks and ensure they gain maximum advantage from investments in communications technologies and applications.

BTexact's employees include many who are world leaders in their specialist fields, working at the forefront of standards development and new technologies in areas including multimedia, IP and data networks, mobile communications, network design and management, and business applications. Services are offered to customers directly or through world-class business partners, which include BT Group businesses such as BT Retail, BT Wholesale and BT Ignite.

BTexact is headquartered at Adastral Park, at one end of the Cambridge-2-Ipswich Hi Tech Corridor, and is a founder member of the Cambridge Network. It has offices and laboratories worldwide including locations across the UK and in Asia, continental Europe, and North America.
For more information about BTexact Technologies, please go to www.btexact.com.

For further information, contact:

David Pincott, Pirate Communications, T: 0207 760 7052,
Mob: 07866 261198 or email: mailto:david@piratecomms.com

Justine Manché, Pirate Communications, T: 0207 760 7053,
Mob: 07811 164724 or email: mailto:justine@piratecomms.com

Paul Brewer, Pirate Communications, T: 0207 760 7057,
Mob: 07812 348222 or email: mailto:paul@piratecomms.com

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