Congratulations to 2nd Year DPhil in Statistics student Ísak Valsson on winning the People’s Poster Prize at the RSC’s 7th "AI in Chemistry" symposium held at Churchill College, Cambridge 16th-18th September, 2024.

Three white men stood on a stage. One, closest to the camera, has curly hair and wears glasses, is holding a certificate which is being presented to him by the other two men who appear to be older due to their grey and white hair.
Ísak receiving his People’s Poster Prize from Dr Chris Swain, Co-Chair of the Organizing Committee of the RSC’s 7th "AI in Chemistry” symposium.

 

Research on AEV-PLIG

Ísak completed his MSc in Statistical Science under the supervision of Prof. Garrett M. Morris, developing AEV-PLIG which incorporates atomic environment vectors into protein-ligand interaction GNNs for binding affinity prediction. By predicting how tightly a small molecule will bind to a protein, we can computationally screen large numbers of molecules to find lead compounds faster and thus accelerate drug discovery.

Ísak continued his work on AEV-PLIG with Prof. Morris and Prof. Charlotte Deane in the Oxford Protein Informatics Group, successfully improving its accuracy and demonstrating its improved ability to generalize on a new “OOD Test” benchmark he has also developed.

In a collaboration with Prof. Philip Biggin in the Department of Biochemistry, Prof. Biggin's former postdoc Dr Matthew Warren, and Dr Aniket Anighoro at Boehringer Ingelheim, Ísak has shown AEV-PLIG is approaching the accuracy of much slower free energy perturbation methods which are widely used in pharma to predict differences in ΔG of binding for compounds in congeneric series of potential drugs. You can read more about the AEV-PLIG method on ChemRxiv ("How to make machine learning scoring functions competitive with FEP”https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv-2024-bth5z).

 

Ísak explaining his work to Dr John Jumper from Google DeepMind—one of the keynote speakers.

When presenting the award, Dr Swain commented that there had been a large number of very high-quality poster submissions and that People’s Prize was the most prestigious of the three awards.

Well done, Ísak!
 

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Words and images provided by Professor Garrett Morris.