LG CNS said on the 12th that it completed building Dong-A Socio Group's "AI new drug development platform" together with DAI, the group's IT affiliate.
The platform integrates new drug research data and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to support key research steps from discovering candidate substances to verification. It links and trains on AI prediction results and actual experimental data so that, as research progresses, AI prediction performance can improve. The two companies built the new drug development platform over about six months.
New drug development generally takes 10 to 15 years and requires enormous expense because countless candidate substances must be verified repeatedly. AI can quickly screen candidate substances with a higher chance of success and predict efficacy and safety in advance to reduce development time, expense, and the risk of failure.
With this platform, LG CNS integrated and standardized new drug research data that had been dispersed across compound and genome information, experimental results, papers, and patents. Researchers can use needed data on a single platform and tap AI analysis and prediction features with just a few clicks.
The platform supports the main steps of new drug development stage by stage. In the step that identifies disease causes, it analyzes and visualizes cell-by-cell gene information and in-tissue location information with AI to help researchers easily discover therapeutic targets. In the candidate design step, Generative AI directly designs new molecular structures that meet the criteria.
In the verification step, it predicts, through simulation, binding potential between candidate substances and targets and operational stability to select promising candidates. It conducts virtual verification in a computer environment before actual experiments.
The AI model's performance is continually improved. By comparing AI prediction results with actual experimental data and feeding them back into retraining, prediction performance advances as research data accumulates, the company said.
An LG CNS official said, "We organically linked the steps from data collection to AI analysis, experimentation, and verification to improve the speed and quality of new drug development, and ensured that the accumulated research data can be used as an asset." Considering the sensitivity of new drug research data, it also established a management framework that can meet regulatory and security requirements in the pharmaceutical industry.
This platform build was based on the pharmaceutical and bio AX (AI transformation) capabilities that LG CNS has accumulated. Earlier, LG CNS took part in the Ministry of Health and Welfare's "K-AI new drug development preclinical and clinical model development project (R&D)" and developed Chong Kun Dang pharmaceutical's "agentic AI-based annual quality assessment report drafting service," among other efforts to expand pharmaceutical and bio AX projects across the public and private sectors. Recently, it has been expanding its business by promoting the agentic AI platform specialized for the pharmaceutical and bio field, "AgenticWorks for Bio."
Lee Jae-seung, executive director in charge of cloud business at LG CNS, said, "With differentiated AX technologies, including agentic AI, and specialized capabilities in the pharmaceutical and bio field, we will contribute to innovation in AI-based new drug research and development in Korea's pharmaceutical and bio industry," adding, "We will actively support customers so they can strengthen their competitiveness in new drug development."