Alan Nafiiev

The BRD4 (Bromodomain-containing protein 4) protein is a transcriptional factor that plays an important role in cancer development. It has attracted a lot of attention in recent years as a promising drug target because its inhibition stops the proliferation of cancer cells.

BRD4 is a member of a family which contains several related proteins sharing the same structural motif called Bromo- and Extra-Terminal domain (BET). Although dozens of drugs that target bromodomains are proposed, the search for better inhibitors of BRD proteins in general and selective inhibitors of BRD4 in particular is still of great demand for cancer therapy.

Over the last five or so years, the drug discovery industry has started adopting artificial intelligence (AI) at unprecedented scale, with pretty much every big and small pharma company doing some kind of pilots or more substantial projects having some AI component in it – from machine learning algorithms and deep learning networks to natural language processing models. Technology proved to have such a fundamental impact on performance of drug discovery work, that we now see a wave of young companies  – sometimes referred to as "digital biotech" – which have a whole new business model revolving around the platform-based process of innovation. Some companies have "end-to-end" drug design platforms capable of automatically doing not only concept creation and target discovery, but also hit discovery, part of lead optimization work, and even predicting clinical trial outputs and identifying clinically-relevant biomarkers.