ATOMsci

About ATOMsci

The Accelerating Therapeutics for Opportunities in Medicine (ATOM) consortium is a public-private partnership aimed at transforming drug discovery. Established in October 2017, its mission is to shorten the preclinical development timeline from a multi-year process to under one year. The initiative was first announced in 2016 as part of the Cancer Moonshot task force, with founding members including GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research (FNLCR), and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

ATOM is developing a preclinical drug design platform that integrates high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and diverse biological data to create a more rapid, integrated, and patient-centric model. The consortium's approach uses data-driven modeling and generative molecular design to assess pharmacology, safety, and efficacy criteria early in the process. By creating an open and sharable platform, ATOM aims to pre-test numerous molecules simultaneously for safety and effectiveness, initially with a focus on precision oncology.

A key component of this initiative is the ATOM Modeling PipeLine (AMPL), an open-source, extensible software pipeline designed for building and sharing models to advance in-silico drug discovery. AMPL provides an end-to-end data-driven modeling pipeline for generating machine learning models that can predict key safety and pharmacokinetic parameters. The consortium has expanded to include additional Department of Energy national laboratories, such as Argonne, Brookhaven, and Oak Ridge, to further enhance the AI-driven platform.