Latest news with #NadiaHarhen
Business Insider
a day ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Nvidia-Backed SandboxAQ Introduces New AI Medical Data
SandboxAQ, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup backed by Nvidia (NVDA), released new data today that could help drug makers develop new medicines. This data includes details on how drugs connect to proteins, which could help scientists better determine the effectiveness of a treatment. Confident Investing Starts Here: Easily unpack a company's performance with TipRanks' new KPI Data for smart investment decisions Receive undervalued, market resilient stocks right to your inbox with TipRanks' Smart Value Newsletter Interestingly, this data doesn't come from years of lab research. Instead, SandboxAQ produced it with the help of Nvidia's processors. This allowed it to create simulated synthetic molecules based on real-world data. SandboxAQ believes the information gleaned from these virtual tests of proteins will assist with training AI models. These models could then aid scientists as they research new medical treatments. Nadia Harhen, general manager of AI simulation at SandboxAQ, told Reuters that this will allow researchers to 'use the synthetic data in a way that's never been done before.' What Does This Mean for Nvidia? First off, Nvidia is already a backer of SandboxAQ, meaning it wants to see the company succeed. The introduction of new data to train AI models is a boon to NVDA, as it is the world's leading provider of graphics processing units (GPUs) used in AI servers. The more uses there are for AI, the higher the demand for AI servers. That will also push demand for Nvidia's products higher, boosting its business and potentially further securing its dominance in the AI sector. Recent analyst coverage backs up this idea. Five-star Barclays analyst Thomas O'Malley reiterated a Buy rating and increased his price target for NVDA stock to $200 from $170, suggesting a 38.77% upside. Is Nvidia Stock a Buy, Sell, or Hold? average NVDA stock price target of $173.19, representing a potential 20.17% upside for the shares.
The Star
2 days ago
- Science
- The Star
Nvidia-backed AI startup SandboxAQ creates new data to speed up drug discovery
FILE PHOTO: A NVIDIA logo is shown at SIGGRAPH 2017 in Los Angeles, California, U.S. July 31, 2017. REUTERS/Mike Blake SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -SandboxAQ, an artificial intelligence startup spun out of Alphabet's Google and backed by Nvidia, on Wednesday released a trove of data it hopes will speed up the discovery of new medical treatments by helping scientists understand how drugs stick to proteins. The goal is to help scientists predict whether a drug will bind to its target in the human body. But while the data is backed up by real-world scientific experiments, it did not come from a lab. Instead, SandboxAQ, which has raised nearly $1 billion in venture capital, generated the data using Nvidia's chips and will feed it back into AI models that it hopes scientists can use to rapidly predict whether a small-molecule pharmaceutical will bind to the protein that researchers are targeting, a key question that must be answered before a drug candidate can move forward. For example, if a drug is meant to inhibit a biological process like the progression of a disease, scientists can use the tool to predict whether the drug molecule is likely to bind to the proteins involved in that process. The approach is an emerging field that combines traditional scientific computing techniques with advancements in AI. In many fields, scientists have long had equations that can precisely predict how atoms combine into molecules. But even for relatively small three-dimensional pharmaceutical molecules, the potential combinations become far too vast to calculate manually, even with today's fastest computers. So SandboxAQ's approach was to use existing experimental data to calculate about 5.2 million new, "synthetic" three-dimensional molecules - molecules that haven't been observed in the real world, but were calculated with equations based on real-world data. That synthetic data, which SandboxAQ is releasing publicly, can be used to train AI models that can predict whether a new drug molecule is likely to stick to the protein researchers are targeting in a fraction of the time it would take to calculate it manually, while retaining accuracy. SandboxAQ will charge money for its own AI models developed with the data, which it hopes will get results that rival running lab experiments, but virtually. "This is a long-standing problem in biology that we've all, as an industry, been trying to solve for," Nadia Harhen, general manager of AI simulation at SandboxAQ, told Reuters on Tuesday. "All of these computationally generated structures are tagged to a ground-truth experimental data, and so when you pick this data set and you train models, you can actually use the synthetic data in a way that's never been done before." (Reporting by Stephen Nellis; Editing by Leslie Adler)
