Gerard van Westen is a full professor in the Division of Drug Discovery and Safety at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research. He is a member of the interdisciplinary research programme Society, Artificial Intelligence and Life Sciences (SAILS). His main area of research is leveraging artificial intelligence with diverse and large-scale public data (‘big data’) for precision medicine.

More information about Gerard van Westen

I am a full professor at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR), heading the Computational Drug Discovery group, which focusses on computational methods integrated in different parts of the drug discovery process. The group is embedded in the Drug Discovery and Safety division.

The main line of artificial intelligence research is focussed on polypharmacology modeling, characterisation of allosteric modulators, resistance modeling (viral, biological, and agricultural), and innovative treatments for cancer. For this I explore the complementarity of diverse data sources. e.g. the prediction of binding mode (allosterism) using text-mined data, protein, and chemical descriptors.

In addition to these AI projects there is also a structure-based drug discovery component that uses crystal or cryo-EM structures to gain insights into binding modes and molecular dynamics.

My PhD was in the field of of proteochemometric modeling at the LACDR in collaboration with Janssen Pharmaceutica in Beerse, Belgium. Subsequently, I have done a postdoc at the European Molecular Biology Lab - European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in the ChEMBL group headed by John Overington. After that I was assigned to a bridge postdoc between LACDR and the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS). Subsequently I enrolled in a tenure track expanding AI research at LACDR leading p to my current position.

Currently I have authored over 70 peer-reviewed publications, obtained three personal grants, was co-applcant on several two others, and have received several awards (among which 'Discover of the year 2013' of the Leiden University faculty of Science). Please see my personal website (www.gjpvanwesten.nl) for further info, posters, and reprint requests.

Publications