University of Chicago Medicine Partners With Argonne to Use AI to Develop New Treatments for Drug-Resistant Cancer

Research from the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center (UCCCC) will receive $6 million as part of a project to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) approaches to develop new treatments for drug-resistant cancer. UChicago Medicine's website has the news.

Funding is being provided by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which is an “agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services established in 2022 to fast-track transformative biomedical research.”

Cancer drug discovery is a process that typically takes “up to 15 years and more than $2 billion” in order to move from discovery of a target to FDA approval. Plus, less than 10% of human proteins are “estimated to be druggable,” leaving many cancer patients without effective treatment options.

The joint Argonne/UCCCC project will endeavor to “narrow down the search to only the most promising compounds that can be translated into better treatments.” Researchers will use Argonne’s computing and experimental facilities to “screen billions of possible molecules…in a matter of a couple of hours and simulate thousands of complexes within days.” The team will then test this new model on “targets known to be relevant in ovarian cancer,” which is notoriously resistant to treatment.