Industrializing AI-powered drug discovery: lessons learned from the Patrimony computing platform.

INTRODUCTION: As a mid-size international pharmaceutical company, we initiated 4 years ago the launch of a dedicated high-throughput computing platform supporting drug discovery. The platform named 'Patrimony' was built up on the initial predicate to capitalize on our proprietary data while leveraging public data sources in order to foster a Computational Precision Medicine approach with the power of artificial intelligence. AREAS COVERED: Specifically, Patrimony is designed to identify novel therapeutic target candidates. With several successful use cases in immuno-inflammatory diseases, and current ongoing extension to applications to oncology and neurology, we document how this industrial computational platform has had a transformational impact on our R&D, making it more competitive, as well time and cost effective through a model-based educated selection of therapeutic targets and drug candidates. EXPERT OPINION: We report our achievements, but also our challenges in implementing data access and governance processes, building up hardware and user interfaces, and acculturing scientists to use predictive models to inform decisions.

4DXpress: a database for cross-species expression pattern comparisons.

In the major animal model species like mouse, fish or fly, detailed spatial information on gene expression over time can be acquired through whole mount in situ hybridization experiments. In these species, expression patterns of many genes have been studied and data has been integrated into dedicated model organism databases like ZFIN for zebrafish, MEPD for medaka, BDGP for Drosophila or GXD for mouse. However, a central repository that allows users to query and compare gene expression patterns across different species has not yet been established. Therefore, we have integrated expression patterns for zebrafish, Drosophila, medaka and mouse into a central public repository called 4DXpress (expression database in four dimensions). Users can query anatomy ontology-based expression annotations across species and quickly jump from one gene to the orthologues in other species. Genes are linked to public microarray data in ArrayExpress. We have mapped developmental stages between the species to be able to compare developmental time phases. We store the largest collection of gene expression patterns available to date in an individual resource, reflecting 16 505 annotated genes. 4DXpress will be an invaluable tool for developmental as well as for computational biologists interested in gene regulation and evolution. 4DXpress is available at http://ani.embl.de/4DXpress.

Using Trawler_standalone to discover overrepresented motifs in DNA and RNA sequences derived from various experiments including chromatin immunoprecipitation.

Genome-wide location analysis has become a standard technology to unravel gene regulation networks. The accurate characterization of nucleotide signatures in sequences is key to uncovering the regulatory logic but remains a computational challenge. This protocol describes how to best characterize these signatures (motifs) using the new standalone version of Trawler, which was designed and optimized to analyze chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) data sets. In particular, we describe the three main steps of Trawler_standalone (motif discovery, clustering and visualization) and discuss the appropriate parameters to be used in each step depending on the data set and the biological questions addressed. Compared to five other motif discovery programs, Trawler_standalone is in most cases the fastest algorithm to accurately predict the correct motifs especially for large data sets. Its running time ranges within few seconds to several minutes, depending on the size of the data set and the parameters used. This protocol is best suited for bioinformaticians seeking to use Trawler_standalone in a high-throughput manner.