Major cultural project granted from the Alfred Kordelin Foundation

The University of Helsinki's medicinal chemistry project has been awarded €300,000 in funding from the Alfred Kordelin Foundation to advance the development of innovative machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to promote drug discovery and development.

A big thank you to the Alfred Kordelin Foundation for the significant support of our AI-based drug development research! The project leads Niklas Johansson and Juri Timonen, as well as the entire research team, greatly appreciate your support.

The medicinal chemistry related project of the University of Helsinki has been awarded €300,000 in funding for the "Major Cultural Project" grant, aimed at developing new machine learning and AI methods to accelerate drug development. This multidisciplinary project strengthens the intersection of AI and drug design, enabling entirely new approaches in pharmaceutical research. The research not only opens new opportunities in drug development but also strengthens Finland's position in global AI research.

"As part of the project, we are developing methods that combine the dynamic simulations of interactions between drug molecules and their targets with machine learning, much like how large language models detect semantic meanings in text," says Dr. Juri Timonen, Senior researcher in Pharmaceutical Chemistry, also working at the University of Eastern Finland.