Accelerating Drug Discovery: How LabGenius Harnesses Graphcore’s IPUs for Innovation
LabGenius Accelerates Drug Discovery with Graphcore’s IPUs
AI-driven scientific research organization LabGenius is leveraging Graphcore’s Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) to enhance its drug discovery process. The firm is primarily focused on uncovering new treatments for cancer and inflammatory disorders through a combination of artificial intelligence, lab automation, and synthetic biology aimed at life-saving outcomes.
Previously reliant on traditional Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), LabGenius has switched to utilizing Graphcore’s IPUs via cloud services from Cirrascale. This transition has significantly decreased the time required for model training, reducing it from approximately one month to just two weeks. Dr. Katya Putintseva, a Machine Learning Advisor at LabGenius, emphasized this improvement, stating, “With Graphcore, we reduced the turnaround time to about two weeks, allowing us to experiment and observe results much more quickly.”
LabGenius specifically employs IPUs to train a BERT Transformer model on an extensive dataset of known proteins to predict masked amino acids. This approach is designed to facilitate the model’s understanding of the fundamental biophysics of proteins. Tom Ashworth, the Head of Technology at LabGenius, explained, “The system examines various features related to the molecule, including point mutations to the overall structure of complex proteins, making suggestions for what to design next based on changes in input and output.”
As one in two individuals will face a cancer diagnosis during their lifetime, there is an urgent need for treatments that minimize suffering. While current cancer treatments improve survival rates, only around 50% of patients are expected to survive for a decade or longer. The goal of LabGenius is to find new cancer therapies that can enhance survival rates while alleviating discomfort. While its current focus is on cancer, the methodologies developed can extend to treating other significant diseases that affect society.
“Graphcore has transformed our capabilities by accelerating model training time from weeks to mere days,” stated Ashworth. “This advancement allows our data scientists to operate at the speed of their thoughts.”
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