ARTIFICIALLY –

Feb. 20, 2023 – Kappa-opioid receptors are known to mediate brain rewards. “If you’re addicted and you’re trying to quit, at some point you will get withdrawal symptoms, and those can be really hard to overcome,” Salas Estrada explained, “after a lot of opioid exposure, your brain gets rewired to need more drugs. Blocking the activity of the kappa opioid receptor has been shown in animal models to reduce this need to use drugs in the withdrawal period.”

However, discovering drugs that can block the activity of a protein, such as the kappa-opioid receptor, can be a long and expensive process. Using computational tools can make it more efficient, but it can take months to screen billions of chemical compounds. Instead, Salas Estrada is using artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize the process.

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