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Defending against the unknown

In a groundbreaking development for addressing future viral pandemics, GUIDE researchers have successfully combined an artificial intelligence (AI)-backed platform with supercomputing to redesign and restore the effectiveness of antibodies whose ability to fight viruses has been compromised by viral evolution.

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Accelerating drug discovery

The Generative Unconstrained Intelligent Drug Engineering (GUIDE) program was developed to fundamentally change our biodefense preparedness posture by taking a strategic approach to reducing the threat space by enabling a revolutionary acceleration in drug development, and creating a capabilities-based framework and infrastructure to enable a rapid response to new biothreats.

GUIDE aims to cost-effectively discover medical countermeasure (MCM) candidates for emerging and unanticipated biothreats. This capability improves response times across an ever-growing threat space, potentially deter adversaries, and significantly advance computational biological strategies that can benefit a wide range of drug development efforts.

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What are medical countermeasures?

Medical countermeasures — are life-saving drugs, vaccines, devices, and other medical solutions that counter chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats. 

Computationally-designed medical countermeasures

The proliferation and unpredictability of biothreats makes medical countermeasure (MCM) development prioritization difficult, and the cost and timeline to full FDA licensure for a single MCM — which can cost $1–2 billion and require 10–15 years to complete — renders the development of FDA-licensed MCMs for all potential threats impractical and unaffordable.

GUIDE fundamentally changes our biodefense preparedness posture by taking a strategic approach to threat preparedness, enabling a revolutionary acceleration in drug development, and creating a capabilities-based framework and infrastructure to enable rapid response. When fully implemented, GUIDE will provide multiple strategic advantages including the ability to:

  • Build a preemptive library of medical countermeasure (MCM) candidates
  • Rapidly respond to unforeseen or engineered biothreats
  • Optimize MCM candidates for a number of important product characteristics
  • Reduce drug development risks and increase the likelihood of success

Learn more about our research

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GUIDE program office

GUIDE is a JPEO-CBRND-JPL-EB program that makes it possible to harness the power of advanced simulation and machine learning to enable preparedness and facilitate rapid response to address a diverse and dynamic threat space.

Join the GUIDE team

From immunology to machine learning and systems biology to molecular dynamics simulation, GUIDE is a multidisciplinary effort. Discover open positions at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.