Preview: Gerard van Westen, speaker at the Evening of Chemistry

The advance of AI has spread rapidly across all aspects of our society. Although ChatGPT currently attracts the most attention, applications of AI in chemistry and computer-assisted drug research were already well established long before the current AI era. ‘History teaches us that AI will likely be a synergistic addition to drug research, a computational co-pilot for the scientist,’ says Van Westen. ‘As more and more scientific data becomes open access and ever greater computing power becomes available, the application of AI in drug discovery offers fantastic new opportunities.’

‘New and advanced methods that support and accelerate the drug discovery process are often found at the intersection of chemistry, biology, and computer science,’ Van Westen continues. ‘In this lecture, I will provide an overview of the research we are currently conducting at the Computational Drug Discovery group in Leiden. Central to this is the use of AI and the combination of chemical and biological data. I will give several examples and conclude with a look at the exciting new possibilities that we are on the cusp of.’

Following his winning of the Golden Medal 2023, C2W | Mens & Molecule spoke with Van Westen about his research. You can read the full interview here. You can also register for the Avond van de Chemie.