Google Cloud has launched two new AI-powered solutions to accelerate drug discovery and advance precision medicine for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. The Target and Lead Identification Suite aims to help drug companies better understand the structure of proteins, while the Multiomics Suite supports researchers to ingest, store, analyse and share vast amounts of genomic data. 

Why it’s notable:

• The Target and Lead Identification Suite will help biopharma companies to bring therapeutics to the market faster, by supporting researchers with the time-consuming process of identifying the biological targets. Google Cloud’s Suite supports this by enabling researchers to ingest, share, and manage data, using this to predict protein structures with more accuracy and at a greater scale, compared to traditional methods. 

• Furthermore, using the Multiomics Suite, organisations will be able to streamline and accelerate the analysis of genomic data, design clinical genomics, accelerate personalised medicine, and interpret genomic data, a process many organisations don’t currently have the infrastructure to support.  By supporting researchers to obtain a better understanding of certain diseases and the way patients' respond to medicines, the new solution has the potential to accelerate the development of personalised drugs and treatments. 

Industry implications:

• Google Cloud’s new solutions have the potential to help address the lengthy and costly process of bringing a new drug to market. The process can take 12-15 years and cost in excess of $1 billion and in addition, medicines that do reach clinical trial stage have only a 16% chance of receiving approval in the U.S. Several multinational companies such as Pfizer and biotech company Cerevel Therapeutics and Colossal Biosciences have already adopted the technology, demonstrating the market need for this technology. 

• The latest solutions seem to be part of Google Cloud’s strategy to advance life science through AI, with continued investments in medical large language model (LLM) research. Recently, the company announced that Med-PaLM 2, a version of Google's original LLM, the Pathways Language Model (PaLM), would be made available for selected customers for limited testing. This was in addition to an announcement of its Claims Acceleration Suite, an AI-driven solution designed to streamline prior authorisation and claims processing for healthcare providers and payers.

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