Case Study: Harvard Medical School accelerates COVID-19 drug discovery with Google for Education

Harvard Medical School screens 1.4 billion compounds in 5 days with Google for Education

Harvard Medical School faced the urgent challenge of accelerating the drug discovery process for new COVID-19 treatments. The arduous task of matching chemical compounds to protein targets, a crucial first step, was too slow for traditional wet lab methods given the scale of the pandemic. Researchers turned to Google for Education and leveraged Google Cloud to scale their computational approach.

Using Google Cloud's scalable processing, the team ran their open-source VirtualFlow platform to conduct ultra-large virtual screenings. They simulated 35 billion docking instances across over a billion compounds, a process that took just five days. This allowed them to quickly identify the most promising drug targets, which they then shared publicly via Google’s Public Datasets to further advance global COVID-19 research.

Harvard Medical School