Drug discovery is less like finding a key to fit a lock—a familiar but misleading analogy—and more like finding a dance partner who can match your moves, as scientists at U.K.-based biotech company C4X Discovery Holdings PLC put it.
C4X is designing small molecules to find drugs for treating cancer and autoimmune diseases. The company is developing its own VR platform, 4Sight, to help make drug-molecule visualization faster and easier.
Nanome, which was founded by experts in nanoengineering, electrical engineering, human-computer interaction and VR, is working to develop an AI assistant that can guide users through their VR experience. Its virtual assistant could ask scientists, for example, if they want to see more or less atomic detail or additional chemical interactions.
For now, Dr. von Salm says she is pleased to stand in a virtual room and visualize her compounds without having to rely so much on imagination or computer renderings.
“Even for the best people who have a really amazing imagination, you’d put them in this room, and they’d be in awe,” she says.
See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/virtual-reality-puts-drug-researchers-inside-the-molecules-they-study-11631023212