SK Biopharmaceuticals builds massive AI dataset to speed up drug discovery

SK Biopharmaceuticals, a Korean firm focused on developing original prescription drugs, has built a massive artificial intelligence (AI) dataset of more than 7 million chemical entries to streamline candidate screening for new therapies. The project is part of the Ministry of Science and ICT’s program to develop AI foundation models for specific fields. A foundation model is a large AI model trained on vast amounts of data that can be adapted for many tasks. SK Biopharmaceuticals belongs to a medical and health care consortium led by medical AI firm Lunit, along with Trillion Labs, Kakao Healthcare and other companies, universities and hospitals. The consortium built a base model specialized in medical science. It then developed versions focused on three areas: drug development, covering chemical compounds and proteins; omics, the large-scale study of genes and other biological molecules; and clinical research. SK Biopharmaceuticals put together the drug discovery dataset based on what researchers actually need in the lab. The data covers 66 drug development tasks, including predictin