Molecular Awards

  The SPARROW algorithm automatically identifies the best molecules to test as potential new medicines , given the vast number of factors affecting each choice. The use of AI to streamline drug discovery is exploding. Researchers are deploying machine-learning models to help them identify molecules , among billions of options, that might have the properties they are seeking to develop new medicines. The myriad challenges involved in identifying the best and most cost-efficient molecules to test is one reason new medicines take so long to develop, as well as a key driver of high prescription drug prices. To help scientists make cost-aware choices, MIT researchers developed an algorithmic framework to automatically identify optimal molecular candidates, which minimizes synthetic cost while maximizing the likelihood candidates have desired properties. The algorithm also identifies the materials and experimental steps needed to synthesize these molecules. Their quantitative framewo...

  Microbes such as bacteria and yeast are increasingly being used to produce components of medicines, biofuels, and food. Indeed, baker’s yeast, also known as brewer’s yeast, or  Saccharomyces cerevisiae , is responsible for the fermentation process used in making beer or bread but it is also used at scale to produce other molecules of value for industry.  Using microbes could be key in producing these materials more sustainably, but there is still a lot we don't understand about how microbial communities – particularly yeast – form and keep going.  To answer these questions, Imperial College London researchers  created  a molecular toolkit that uses a new way to produce useful compounds.   The toolkit consists of 15 different yeast strains that over-produce key cellular building blocks – amino acids and nucleotides – but lack the ability to make other building blocks. Unlike traditional synthetic biology communities, the strains were split...

  The study published in Nature Photonics was led by the Max Born Institute in collaboration with King’s College London, Imperial College London, and Università degli Studi di Trieste. The team  has created an entirely new structure of light that traces out a chiral curve over time. This chiral curve has different shapes at different points in space, forming a vortex structure. By interacting with chiral particles it moves through over time, the new ‘chiral vortex’ provides an accurate and robust form of measurement. Chirality is a property of asymmetry important in several branches of science including physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. Many molecules , like human hands, come in couples: they have a ‘right-handed’ and a ‘left-handed’ version, which are mirror images of each other, but cannot be placed on top of each other to look the same.  This ‘handedness’ of the molecule (its chirality) determines how it interacts with biological systems like the human body...