Hello! I'm Lucy, a 2nd year DPhil student on the Computational Discovery CDT and working in OPIG. I'm currently working on fragment-based drug discovery. This consists of developing drugs for a given target protein beginning from fragments that are known to weakly bind to it. When elaborating on a fragment in such campaigns, information about known ligands and the protein pocket can both be leveraged to maximise the binding affinity of the end result. However, using information about known ligands has been demonstrated to bias the drug design process. In collaboration with IBM Research, I am investigating methods to extract information directly from protein pockets in a way that can be used in elaboration campaigns. Before this, I attended Durham University, where I did an integrated Masters degree in Physics.

Machine learning for drug design