Don VAN DYKE
Cloud Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Research Triangle Park, NC, USA 27709
Biography:
Don Van Dyke is Chief Operating Officer at Cloud Pharmaceuticals. His work in AI began at Bio Image Corporation. The company became the leader in image-based genomics and proteomics under his leadership as VP sales, VP worldwide marketing and sales, general manager, and CEO. The company went public on the NASDAQ.
He has had executive roles at two other similar start-ups and advised more than a dozen start-ups and government agencies. He has been a speaker at the College of William and Mary Business School and the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC. He is a graduate of Duke University
Abstract:
Speeding the development of novel drug candidates:
Traditionally, drug discovery and development are very time- and resource-consuming processes. Designing new drugs that bind to a specified protein target requires finding the best molecule in a vast chemical space. With an estimated 1065 stable molecules with a molecular weight below 850 available for exploration; examining this space by direct enumeration and evaluation is prohibitively costly. Cloud Pharmaceuticals’ Quantum Molecular Design (QMD) process enables an efficient and accurate search of this chemical space. QMD uses a combination of reverse engineering and Artificial Intelligence methods to map from a set of desired properties to realistic chemical structures.
Among the desired properties is the ability of a molecule to penetrate the Blood Brain Barrier (BBB.) Cloud has designed a proprietary method for BBB permeability calculation.
QMD’s proprietary technology combines artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing to search virtual chemical space which enables the rapid and accurate discovery, design, and development of new therapeutics to improve human health and wellbeing and represents a paradigm shift in computational drug design, with broad applications in drug discovery.