The results of this study will predict the behavior of the compounds and then develop drugs in laboratories

Four researchers from the group of Bioinformatics and High Performance Computing at the Catholic University of Murcia are working together with universities in Reykjavik (Iceland) and Alicante, in a project that aims to discover new drugs using artificial intelligence.

Using the known blood anticoagulants, the study aims to find connections between molecules that are known and new anticoagulants.

"A list of known anticoagulant is given to the computer and it learns the characteristics of each one of them, it includes patterns and identifies which ones are good and which are bad," says Horacio Pérez, principal investigator of the project. "Then new compounds are tested, which have not been previously studied, to check if they have the previous characterized patterns and it discovers which of them have anticoagulant functions," he says.

It is a methodology that can be applied to obtain new drug candidates, not just anticoagulants, which will then be developed in the relevant laboratories.