Close-up of a pipette dispensing pink liquid into a clear plastic well plate containing multiple small test tubes, commonly used in laboratory experiments or scientific research.

GeneDisco Challenge for machine learning-enabled Drug discovery on 29 April

Digital Future faculty member Stefan Bauer is organising a Machine Learning for Drug Discovery Workshop and the GeneDisco Challenge on Friday 29 April.

Picture of Stefan Bauer– Drug discovery has become an increasingly challenging endeavour: the success rate of developing new therapeutics has been historically low, but this rate has been steadily declining, says Stefan Bauer in an interview for KTH Researchers’ Noticeboard.

The average cost of bringing a new drug to market is twice as high as just a decade earlier. Machine learning-based approaches present a unique opportunity to address this challenge.

Machine learning methods, such as active and reinforcement learning, could aid in optimally exploring the vast biological area by integrating prior knowledge from various information sources. However, there exist no standardised benchmarks and data sets for this challenging task. To solve this problem, we created GeneDisco, a benchmark suite for evaluating active learning algorithms for experimental design in drug discovery, according to Stefan Bauer.

We aim to bring together the community to discuss cutting-edge research in machine learning-enabled drug discovery for the workshop.GeneDisco challenge will hopefully lead to a diverse set of proposed approaches, one of which might outperform the other methods consistently. If implemented at one of the big pharmaceutical companies, an increased success rate of 1 per cent can lead to tens or hundreds of new drugs every year, says Stefan Bauer.

For more information contact Stefan Bauer by mail:  

Interview with Stefan Bauer on Researchers’ Noticeboard

More news

A man in a grey shirt and jeans stands in a modern office corridor with wooden walls. A window labelled “digital future.” is visible beside him. Overhead lights and an emergency exit sign illuminate the space.

Scholar-in-Residence Paul Walton is bridging chemistry, equality, and digital futures

03/09/2025

Paul Walton, a leading figure in bioinorganic chemistry and an internationally known advocate for equality...

A woman interviews a man with glasses in a lab setting, holding a TV4 microphone. Behind them, a screen displays a Volvo car dashboard. Swedish text and project headline appear on the screen.

CAVeaT project featured on Swedish national TV

01/09/2025

On 5 June 2025, the Connected Automated Vehicles trialling and Trustworthiness (CAVeaT) project at KTH was highlighted on Nyhetsdagen,...

People stand and converse in a modern, wood-panelled corridor while viewing research posters on the walls at a conference or academic event. Some attendees are reading posters, whilst others are talking in small groups.

Digital Futures Summer Research Internship 2025 concluded with poster session

28/08/2025

The Digital Futures Summer Research Internship (SRI) 2025, which ran for eight weeks from June...

Honorable Mention for Paper on Intimate Technologies

26/08/2025

A team of researchers, including Digital Futures postdoctoral researcher Alejandra Gómez Ortega, received an Honorable Mention Award at...