60 Seconds with Ram Samudrala and Zackary Falls

Interview by Christopher Schobert, MA ’04, BA ’02

Samudrala and Falls are the brains behind CANDO, an AI-based platform that can model how thousands of compounds affect the body at once, thereby speeding up the drug discovery process from many years to just months.

It’s already given rise to several biotech startups that are using the platform to develop treatments for conditions ranging from non-small cell lung cancer to opioid use disorder.

Both researchers work in the Department of Biomedical Informatics in the Jacobs Schools of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences—Samudrala as professor and chief of the Division of Bioinformatics; Falls as assistant professor. Here, they explain the game-changing functions that CANDO, short for Computational Analysis of Novel Drug Opportunities, really can do.

Samudrala: Most drug discovery methods focus narrowly: one drug, one protein, one disease. That’s why, traditionally, it can take over a decade to produce results. We wanted a smarter, faster way—so we created a platform that looks at how compounds affect the body as a whole, not just one protein. CANDO looks at the big picture: how every drug interacts with every protein in the body and how these complex patterns relate to health and disease. This ‘systems-level’ view helps us understand not just what works, but why it works and what else might work even better.

Falls: CANDO was originally developed as a software package to predict new therapeutic uses for existing drugs. We extended CANDO to evaluate other aspects of drug discovery such as to predict side effects and drug-drug interactions, as well as to design novel drugs with desired attributes.

Samudrala: AI is at the heart of CANDO. We use machine learning to analyze huge datasets of drug-protein interactions, predict new uses for existing drugs and design new ones with optimal properties. Think of AI in CANDO as the engine that sifts through the noise to find hidden patterns and connections that no human could easily spot.

Falls: The evolution of CANDO will integrate patient level clinical and biological data, pushing it toward precision medicine in a way that will allow us to tailor treatments or identify side effects unique to subgroups of people based on personalized features. The ability to assess if a newly designed drug would work better or worse for any given cohort of patients and identify potential side effects and toxicity prior to the drug entering clinical trials would save time, money and lives.

Samudrala: We envision CANDO evolving into a universal platform not just for drug discovery but also for biosensing, diagnostics and personalized medicine, guiding decisions at every step of health care.