Democratizing Machine Learning and Drug Discovery Tool Access on the Cancer Genomics Cloud

This September, the CGC Webinar Series features a talk by Dr. Dennis A. Dean III from Seven Bridges.

Dr. Dean is a Principal Investigator at Seven Bridges, leading several national-scale genomic analysis projects. Dr. Dean leads the Translational Computation and Analytics Team and will present their progress in making machine learning models developed as part of the National Cancer Institute’s Predictive Oncology Model and Data Clearinghouse (MoDaC) program available for use on the Cancer Genomics Cloud. The NCI-sponsored MoDaC program aims to add sophisticated machine learning and drug discovery tool sets to the challenge of identifying novel treatments for Cancer Patients. The MoDaC model repository includes models from three programs: Accelerating Therapeutics for Opportunities in Medicine (ATOM), Advance Computing Solutions for Cancer, and ongoing NCI-DOE collaborations. 

In this presentation, he will demonstrate that translating the MoDaC tools into cloud-native resources on the CGC supports interactive and GUI-driven analysis. Consequently, allowing access to a broader user base than those who traditionally have the technical expertise required to work with machine learning models. He will present ML tools developed as part of the Predictive modeling for Pre-Clinical Screening and the Accelerating Therapeutics for opportunities in Cancer programs. And present details on porting the AMPL1 (A Data-Driven Modeling Pipeline for Drug Discovery) tools as a focal point for discussing standards that might promote portability and ensure equity as pertaining to use and access. 

Reference

1. Minnich, A. J. et al. AMPL: A Data-Driven Modeling Pipeline for Drug Discovery. J Chem Inf Model 60, 1955–1968 (2020).

More about the speaker

Dr. Dean is a Principal Investigator at Seven Bridges, leading several national-scale genomic analysis projects. He directs the Translational Computation and Analytics Team, which focuses on computational approaches to advancing the life sciences, including artificial intelligence and machine learning applications. He also leads Seven Bridges’ collaborations with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) through the BioCompute Object Initiative and the Patient-Derived Xenograft Network, funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennis-a-dean-ii-ph-d-4b97b1b/