Fujitsu Limited and the HPC- and AI-driven Drug Development Platform Division of the RIKEN Center for Computational Science announced that they have developed an AI drug discovery technology that can predict structural changes of proteins from electron microscope images as a 3D density map in wide range by utilizing generative AI in January 2023.

The two parties further plan to present a paper on this technology at MICCAI 2023, the top international conference in the field of medical image processing, on October 10, 2023 (Japan time).

In conjunction with this announcement, Fujitsu also plans to make its prediction technology for protein structural changes available on October 10, 2023 as an AI innovation component of the Fujitsu Kozuchi (code name) - Fujitsu AI Platform, an AI platform that allows users to quickly test out advanced technologies.

As part of a joint research project launched in May 2022, Fujitsu and RIKEN developed a generative AI technology that accurately estimates the various forms of a target protein's conformation and their possible proportions from a large number of projection images taken by electron microscopy, as well as a technology that predicts conformational changes in the target protein from the estimated proportions.

Based on these two technologies, the two parties developed an AI drug discovery technology that can predict structural changes of a protein in a wide range, with the aim of developing next-generation IT drug discovery technology that significantly reduces the development time and cost of drug discovery.

The technology enables the accurate acquisition of protein conformations and changes based on experimental data in more than ten times less time than conventional procedures, thereby enabling innovation in the design process of drugs that bind to target proteins such as bacteria and viruses.

Moving forward, Fujitsu and RIKEN will use the newly developed generative AI technology as one of the core technologies for realizing next-generation IT drug discovery technology that can analyze the complex relationships between target proteins and antibodies, and predict global structural changes of molecules with high accuracy and speed.