Drug Discovery

Researchers in Whitehead Institute Member Richard Young’s lab and colleagues at MIT show that a machine learning model can predict which subcellular compartments a drug will concentrate in based on its chemical features. This could be used to design safer and more effective drugs, and to understand how subcellular compartments govern diverse biochemical processes.

Whitehead Institute Member Jing-Ke Weng studies plant metabolism, the set of processes plants use to produce thousands of unique molecules, many of which have potent medicinal properties. The Weng lab is hunting for more of these molecules in the wild, and developing strategies to sustainably produce plant molecules already of interest at scale.