He’s a fast and animated speaker, which is only logical because Gerard van Westen is driving an express train. His destination? A virtual human, consisting of algorithms that predict what an administered substance will do in the body. The train is already a long way down the line and the pharmaceutical…

Gerard van Westen has received the KNCV Gold Medal, the most important Dutch award for chemists under 40. 'It's a huge honour,' says the professor of AI and medicinal chemistry. 'I am now part of the group of people I was always impressed by.'

Gerard van Westen (LACDR/division of medicinal chemistry) has been awarded with a VENI grant from NWO, the Dutch Research Council.

Former PhD student Gerard van Westen was granted the C.J. Kok Award also known as “Discoverer of the Year”. A festive ceremony took place at the Faculty’s New Year’s reception on January 7, 2014.

Gerard van Westen has been appointed full Professor or Artificial Intelligence and Medicinal Chemistry. This chair has been jointly created by the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR) and the Leiden Institute of Chemistry (LIC) as part of SAILS, the university stimulus program in Artificial…

Brand-new professor Gerard van Westen works at the intersection of artificial intelligence and drug development. For the new chair in Artificial Intelligence and Medicinal Chemistry, he uses computer models to make drug development more efficient. Our ultimate goal is a virtual human which allows you…

Brand-new professor Gerard van Westen works at the intersection of artificial intelligence and drug development. For the new chair in Artificial Intelligence and Medicinal Chemistry, he uses computer models to make drug development more efficient. Our ultimate goal is a virtual human which allows you…

SAILS Professor Gerard van Westen tells us about his first 100 days 'in the office'.

Research question

ChEMBL is a large-scale drug discovery database containing bioactivity information primarily extracted from scientific literature.

Supervisor: Gerard van Westen

Due to the modern techniques of combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening, data on the biological activity of many millions of compounds is known. However, it is still very difficult to transfer this data into knowledge: if we know that compounds A and B bind to a certain protein with high…

Key publications of the Computational Drug Discovery group

This thesis describes the importance of being able to control the selectivity of potential drug candidates.

While bioinformatics methods deal with the analysis of sequence information (be it proteins or DNA), the field of cheminformatics is concerned with the analysis of small-molecule datasets.

Source: J Cheminform, Volume 6, Issue 1 (2014)

Source: J Cheminform, Volume 7, Issue 1 (2015)

Source: Mol Psychiatry (2015)

Als gevolg van de grote technologische vooruitgang in de gezondheidszorg worden in toenemende mate gegevens verzameld tijdens de uitvoering van klinische onderzoeken.

Supervisor: Gerard van Westen

The Data-Driven Drug Discovery Network (D4N) is an initiative by researchers from Leiden University and collaborators to join efforts in applying and developing novel techniques from data science to drug discovery and related topics from bioinformatics.

This thesis focuses on data found in the field of computational drug discovery. New insight can be obtained by applying machine learning in various ways and in a variety of domains. Two studies delved into the application of proteochemometrics (PCM), a machine learning technique that can be used to…

Cancer is the leading cause of death in the Netherlands, and, with over 100 different types of cancer, it’s not a simple disease. Today, skin, breast, lung, prostate and colon cancer are the most diagnosed forms. Therefore, the discovery and development of new drugs has the ability to significantly…

China wordt steeds assertiever in zijn relaties met andere landen, maar achter dit beeld gaat een opmerkelijk diverse maatschappij en politieke realiteit schuil die tal van aanknopingspunten biedt voor samenwerking en verdere integratie van China in de wereld. In China een gids voor de 21e eeuw past…

Research in this group, headed by Gerard van Westen, focusses on computational methods integrated in different parts of the drug discovery process. More specifically, topics include innovative treatments for cancer, selectivity modeling, translational research, allosteric modulation, drug resistance…

The Molecular Physiology group collaborates with both international public-private and academic institutions.

Life Sciences Artificial Intelligence Data Science

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), one of the largest families of membrane proteins, are responsive to a diverse set of physiological endogenous ligands including hormones and neurotransmitters.

In CCLS several subgroups have formed, below you can find an overview of these groups with the names of the leading researchers and a short outline of the project.

Developing new medicines is one of modern science's most significant hurdles, a process marked by high costs, long timelines, and frequent failures of promising candidates.

Cancer is considered the silent pandemic of the 21st century and the second leading cause of death worldwide.

Less than 1 in 10 drug candidates that enter phase 1 clinical trials actually gets approved for human use.

Providing each cancer patient with the right treatment remains a challenge. Oncode Accelerator aims to change this by innovating the way we develop cancer treatments, thus ensuring the patient is at the heart of the process. Leiden University, the LUMC and other partners will implement this new way…

PhD defence

Over several decades, a variety of computational methods for drug discovery have been proposed and applied in practice. With the accumulation of data and the development of machine learning methods, computational drug design methods have gradually shifted to a new paradigm, i.e. deep learning methods…

The integrity and reliability of academic research are of fundamental importance to the University. All parties, both within the University and outside, must be able to have confidence that our research is conducted in a scrupulous, fair, verifiable, impartial and independent manner.

Summer schools and seed funding calls are just two of the many Una Europa opportunities for researchers and teachers at Leiden University and LUMC.

Feedback from fellow students on academic writing is as informative as that of teachers.

The integrity and reliability of academic research are of fundamental importance to the university.

The integrity and reliability of academic research are of fundamental importance to the University. All parties, both within the University and outside, must be able to have confidence that our research is conducted in a scrupulous, fair, verifiable, impartial and independent manner. To make sure PhD…

The team Academic Orientation offers activities for primary and secondary education pupils and their teachers regarding Science for Society and Teacher Professional Development.

The integrity and reliability of academic research are of fundamental importance to the University. All parties, both within the University and outside, must be able to have confidence that our research is conducted in a scrupulous, fair, verifiable, impartial and independent manner. To make sure you…

Leiden academics research the world around us and pass on their knowledge to future generations. Each with his or her individual expertise and personal fascination for a particular discipline, they are the public face of the University.

Although each Dutch university has its own culture and tradition, there are some practices that are common within the academic approach in the Netherlands. Four things you need to know about our academic culture:

Some examples of AI-research done at Leiden.

Key publications of the Predictive Pharmacology group.

The mission in this division, headed by Laura Heitman, is to design and synthesize novel and better ligands for drug targets. Drug discovery is a lengthy but inspiring adventure. It is often an interplay between academic institutes and pharmaceutical industry, in which scientists at university develop…

A new research line is the development of liquid biopsy fingerprints to predict early Alzheimer’s disease (AD) stage in human in readily accessible body fluids in human (in collaboration with: Dr. Geert-Jan Groeneveld, CHDR; Prof. Elga de Vries, Free University Medical Center; and others).