Abcam joins the Innovative Health Initiative LIGAND-AI project to advance artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery through open science
Publish Date: 2026-01-20 10:00:00
Source Domain: www.prnewswire.com
- Abcam has joined the Innovative Health Initiative Project LIGAND-AI, a public-private partnership led by Structural Genomics Consortium and Pfizer, with a budget over €60 million.
- The objective of LIGAND-AI is to advance AI-driven drug discovery through open science by developing predictive models for next-generation therapeutics.
- Abcam will use its expertise in recombinant protein engineering to generate high-quality protein-ligand datasets essential for training the predictive models.
- The partnership involves experts from academia, industry, technology, and research organizations from nine countries, collaborating to create a large, open-access protein-ligand data resource.
- The project aims to create a seamless pipeline from experiments to AI predictions, reducing long timelines, substantial investments, and uncertainties in early drug discovery.
- LIGAND-AI will share all generated data following FAIR principles to ensure they are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable by the global scientific community.
- The initiative contributes to Target 2035, a broader mission aiming to discover chemical modulators for every human protein by 2035.
- The consortium also seeks to train a new generation of interdisciplinary scientists skilled in both computational methods and experimental protein science.
