Case Study: University of Southern California accelerates drug discovery with Google for Education and Google Cloud

University of Southern California screens 680 million compounds in 24 hours with Google for Education

Researchers at the University of Southern California faced the immense computational challenge of screening hundreds of millions of chemical compounds to discover non-addictive pain relief drugs, a process that would have taken a year on their local cluster. With funding from an NIH pilot program, they worked with Google for Education and Onix to leverage Google Cloud's pre-emptible VM instances.

Using Google Cloud, the team ran Virtual Ligand Screening on 200,000 CPU cores, screening 680 million compounds in just 24 hours and narrowing them to about 120 promising candidates. This solution, implemented with Google for Education, accelerated the drug discovery process from a year to a day, dramatically speeding up the path to identifying potential non-addictive opioids and proving the game-changing impact of large-scale cloud computing for biomedical research.

University of Southern California