[MUSIC PLAYING]
NILKANTH PATEL: Whatever we do, there is always a human being
at the center of it, someone who could benefit from our work.
I am Nilkanth Patel, and I am a computational biochemist
at USC.
Addiction to opioids is a major issue in the United States.
Our goal is to develop drugs that
can relieve pain without a high risk of addiction.
Developing new drugs can take as long as a decade and cost
billions of dollars.
We start with a library of half a billion virtual compounds.
Navigating this vast ocean of compounds is challenging.
But we are always thinking of that person waiting
at the end of our journey.
How can we get to them sooner?
Working with Google Cloud, we have
managed to narrow down 680 million compounds
to the 120 most promising ones.
Doing this job with our lab computers
would have taken a year.
Instead, we did it in just 24 hours,
meaning we are that much closer to alternative medications
and that much closer to helping those who might need them.