Professor Charlotte Deane from the Department of Statistics has been announced as a senior principal investigator on a £8 million government-backed consortium that will create the world's largest dataset for AI-driven drug discovery.

Predicting how small molecules (or “ligands”) bind to proteins and other macromolecules like DNA and RNA is an important part of computer-aided drug discovery. Oxford Protein Informatics Group DPhil Student, Martin Buttenschoen, Professor Charlotte Deane and Professor Garrett M. Morris recently examined how well deep learning-based methods can dock a ligand into a protein pocket.