The American Heart Association (AHA) www.heart.org and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) https://www.llnl.gov have formed a strategic business partnership to work together to overcome the burden of drug discovery, cost, and access.
The two organizations will leverage the world’s most powerful super computers to accelerate drug discovery. LLNL scientists and engineers will create a simulated environment that will rapidly and precisely predict how drugs bind to their target proteins and hopefully be able to generate a robust drug pipeline for new and targeted therapies.
It takes an average of ten years for a new medicine to be commercialized in the marketplace at an average cost of $2.8 billion. As the population continues to age, the need for medications to treat chronic conditions will continue to increase and further challenge the current system to remove barriers to affordable healthcare and preventive medicine.
LLNL has been working on computational chemistry to model biological molecules since the early 1990s, and has been developing and applying laboratory-based methods to study drug effectiveness and side effects in humans and animals since the 1960s.
AHA and LLNL are going to work collaboratively to develop and validate new High Performance Computing (HPC) tools. This will enable the biomedical community to be able to validate targeted drug hypotheses that will reduce the time it takes for a drug to reach the market by potentially 50 percent.