Pharmaceutical Bioinformatics

Accelerating drug discovery and chemical safety using artificial intelligence, automation and intelligent design of experiments.

The Pharmaceutical Bioinformatics research group, headed by Professor Ola Spjuth, focuses on data-driven drug discovery and chemical safety. We are an interdisciplinary team of researchers with a vision to develop autonomous biological laboratories where data drives decisions on what experiments should be performednext, and where automation and AI modeling are core methodologies. We combine in silico and in vitro experiments at the cellular level, and have access to a robotized high-content imaging lab connected to a modern IT-infrastructure to manage and analyze large-scale data. Examples of applications include elucidating mechanism-of-action and safety for novel chemical compounds and screening for new and repurposed drugs. Of particular interest to us is to develop and use autonomous systems integrating laboratory equipment with AI for iterative discovery to tackle previously infeasible problems. Here, ongoing projects include searching for optimal individualized drug combinations in precision cancer medicine, and also identifying synergistic combinations of environmental chemicals. We are involved in several national and international consortia and have a tight connection to the pharmaceutical industry, Uppsala University Hospital, and Science for Life Laboratory.

The research group has a dedicated website with more information on the ongoing projects: https://pharmb.io/