On September 19, HUAWEI CONNECT 2022 kicked off in Bangkok, Thailand. At the 
event, Mr. Ken Hu, Rotating and Acting Chairman of Huawei, delivered a keynote 
titled "Unleash Digital," where he talked about how the company is helping 
organizations make the most of cloud for leapfrog development.

During his speech, Mr. Ken Hu spoke about how the First Affiliated Hospital of 
the Medical School at Xi'an Jiaotong University used AI to expedite 
pharmaceutical R&D and new drug discovery.

In the pharmaceutical industry, an average of over 1 billion USD and 10 years 
is needed to put a new drug on the market, from development to approval. While 
developing antibiotics, it has been noted that resistant bacteria are sometimes 
discovered even before newly developed antibiotics finish clinical trials.

By using an AI-aided drug design service powered by Huawei Cloud's Pangu Drug 
Molecule Model, Professor Liu Bing of the First Affiliated Hospital of the 
Medical School at Xi'an Jiaotong University and his team developed a new 
broad-spectrum antimicrobial drug in just one month, and R&D costs were slashed 
by 70%.

A major challenge in new drug discovery lies in the screening of hundreds of 
millions of existing drug molecules. Traditionally, drug screening was 
performed by experts in labs, which was costly, slow, and had a high failure 
rate.

The Huawei Cloud Pangu Drug Molecule Model has been trained using the data of 
1.7 billion drug-life molecules, and can predict the physicochemical properties 
of drug compounds and score them based on their druglikeness. Researchers can 
then do targeted experiments to verify drug compounds that have the highest 
scores.

Moreover, the Pangu Drug Molecule Model's molecular structure optimizer can be 
used to optimize the structure of lead compounds, minimizing the potential side 
effects of the new drugs on normal human cells.

Today, cloud has become an important carrier for digital companies. Huawei 
Cloud provides four development pipelines, including ModelArts the AI 
development pipeline, which customers and partners from all industries can 
access on demand, so they can leave the technical side of digital innovation to 
Huawei Cloud, and concentrate more on what matters most to them.

SOURCE: HUAWEI CLOUD

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   Caption: Mr. Ken Hu delivering his speech at HUAWEI CONNECT 2022