Today digital revolution is having a dramatic impact on the pharmaceutical industry. In LIGATE, the consortium aims to integrate and co-design best in class European components to keep worldwide leadership on Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD) solutions exploiting today high-end supercomputer and tomorrow Exascale resources, fostering the European competitiveness in this field.

The proposed LIGATE solution is a fully integrated workflow capable to run an in-silico drug discovery campaign in less than one day to respond promptly to worldwide pandemic crisis.

Since the evolution of HPC architectures is heading toward specialization and extreme heterogeneity, the LIGATE solution focuses also on code portability and auto-tuning techniques with the possibility to deploy the designed CADD platform on any available type of architecture in order not to have a vendor lock-in problem.

The project plans to make the platform available and open to support the discovery a novel treatment to fight virus infections and multidrug-resistant bacteria. LIGATE builds on top of the Exscalate4CoV project, where a first version of the platform has been used in the search for candidate new drugs to be used as an effective therapy to fight COVID-19.

The LIGATE project involves 11 partners from 5 different countries (Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria and Czech Republic). Politecnico di Milano is one of the key partners of the project with its role as scientific coordinator. In particular, the research team is composed of Prof. Gianluca Palermo, Prof. Cristina Silvano, Prof. Danilo Ardagna and their research groups.