The ISE Algorithm development earns Prof. Amiram Goldblum the 2017 Kaye Innovation Award. The algorithm leads to a dramatic improvement in the drug discovery process, shortening the process from years to months.
Over the past years, the Iterative Stochastic Elimination (ISE) algorithm developed in the laboratory of Prof. Amiram Goldblum at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has been applied to discovering potential drugs. The algorithm was applied first to solve problems in proteins' structure and function. Recently it has been used to find drug candidates for numerous indications in a short time.
The algorithm produces a model for small molecules' activity on one or more targets known to cause the disease. A model is a set of filters of physicochemical properties that distinguish between active and non-active molecules or between more and less active ones. Millions of molecules can then be screened by the model and ranking by a score. The score reflects the molecule's ability to pass through the filters based on its physicochemical properties.
A model of this type is usually built in a few hours and can screen millions of molecules in less than a day. Therefore, within a few days or more, it is possible to make initial predictions about the candidate molecules for a specific activity to combat a disease. Most of those candidates have never been known before to have any biological activity.
The algorithm can be applied to other types of problems, where the number of possibilities is immense and are not solvable even if the world's most powerful computers would work on it together. These include issues in which the number of possible outcomes are 10 to the power of 100 and more, such as problems of land transport, aviation, communications, and biological systems.
The Kaye Innovation Award
“The Kaye Innovation Awards at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have been awarded annually since 1994. Isaac Kaye of England, a prominent industrialist in the pharmaceutical industry, established the awards to encourage faculty, staff, and students of the Hebrew University to develop innovative methods and inventions with good commercial potential, which will benefit the university and society. For more information about the 2017 Kaye Innovations Awards, visit http://bit.ly/kaye2017.”