Helping Hongbo Pharmaceutical to accelerate drug research and development

Human diseases are becoming more and more complex, but drug development is becoming more and more difficult. At present, it takes more than 10 years for a new drug to be approved and launched from drug discovery to clinical verification. Drug research and development is high-investment, high-tech, high-risk, Due to the long-term characteristics, many companies no longer rely solely on experiments to discover drugs, but try to use AI, big data and other computer technologies to assist and accelerate drug research and development. Hongbo Medicine and Shenshi Technology are companions on this road.

Hongbo Pharmaceutical is a fast-growing new drug research and development service and API production company. It is committed to providing global pharmaceutical customers with one-stop small molecule drug development and production solutions. The company's business covers drug discovery, process and pharmaceutical research, and raw materials. fields such as pharmaceutical production. The process of drug development is very complicated, from early discovery of disease targets, target-specific lead compound reagents and optimization, selection of clinical drug candidates, and later process development, scale-up and commercial production.

In the pre-clinical compound design and optimization stage, Hongbo Medicine and Shenshen Technology have launched in-depth cooperation. Using Shenshen Technology’s Hermite® drug computational design platform, the molecular-level kinetic simulation of the compound is carried out, which can efficiently Assess the binding of proteins and ligands to realize large-scale optimal screening of lead compounds, thereby improving the efficiency of drug development.

Molecular-level simulation means that it is invisible to the naked eye and requires extremely high computing power. To calculate the molecular motion of 200 nanoseconds requires 30 TFLOPS, which is the computing power that can perform 30 trillion floating-point operations per second. It can only be simulated in hours, and the workflow of drug research and development is project-based, which means that a large amount of computing power needs to be issued each time, and released after the calculation is completed. Such a demand is very suitable for the elastic high-performance computing power of the public cloud.
Picture: Cai Zhenwei, executive vice president of Hongbo Pharmaceutical

Cai Zhenwei, executive vice president of Hongbo Pharmaceutical, said: "The Hermite® platform of Shenshi Technology and the high-performance computing E-HPC cluster of Alibaba Cloud have greatly improved the molecular simulation efficiency of Hongbo Pharmaceutical, reduced the synthesis cost of Hongbo Pharmaceutical, and reduced The waiting time for custom synthesis is reduced, and the time for pipeline advancement to clinical candidate compounds is greatly shortened."

At present, Hongbo Pharmaceutical can complete a free energy perturbation calculation within 10-15 hours, and we can usually accurately evaluate the affinity of thousands of throughput-level candidate compounds within one day. "For IP protection in cloud computing, relying on Alibaba Cloud Computing Nest, Hongbo Medicine can audit the operation of Shenshi Technology at any time. Such transparency greatly enhances our sense of security." Cai Zhenwei, executive vice president of Hongbo Medicine, emphasized.

Shenshi Technology is the leader and practitioner of the "AI for Science" scientific research paradigm. It is committed to using artificial intelligence and molecular simulation algorithms, combined with advanced computing methods to solve important scientific problems, and to provide biomedicine, energy, materials and information science and Engineering research, creating a new generation of micro-scale industrial design and simulation platform.

In the past, Shenshi Technology mainly served Hongbo Medicine and other enterprises in the form of privatization deployment, and put more manpower in heavy work such as product delivery, operation and maintenance, which caused a relatively large manpower burden and affected product innovation s efficiency. The cloud-based SaaS delivery form is very convenient, but it is opaque to users, which makes pharmaceutical companies always want to use it but is discouraged.

Currently, the data security isolation and auditing solution provided by Alibaba Cloud's Cloud Computing Nest service solves the above problems well. Through Computing Nest, Shenshi Technology can automatically complete the environment creation of tenants on the cloud with one click. The cost of cloud resources can be finely managed according to the needs of tenants, and it can also take into account transparent operations on the user side; at the same time, the use of cloud resources and All users can see the operation records, and can also obtain operation permissions according to the actual situation.

"Through the Alibaba Cloud Computing Nest service, Hongbo Medicine can enjoy the elastic and high-performance computing power of the public cloud without any worries. We also save manpower in delivery and can focus more on product innovation." Shenshi Technology Biomedical Business Group Vice President Fan Mengqi concluded.

At present, Shenshi Technology uses Alibaba Cloud's elastic high-performance computing E-HPC cluster, combined with preemptive instances, to achieve the delivery of massive resources at a cost of 30%. The operation and maintenance cost of technology has improved the efficiency of cluster management; at the same time, Shenshen Technology’s Hermite® drug computing design platform, based on Alibaba Cloud’s computing nest service, provides pharmaceutical companies with a delivery solution that takes into account SaaS flexibility and data security, maximizing It improves the operation and maintenance efficiency of Hermite® on the cloud, and further strengthens customers' trust in Hermite®.

In the future, Alibaba Cloud will work with Shenshi Technology to provide a better platform for accelerating drug research and development, and jointly provide assistance to customers in the life science industry.