AI4DR: Development and implementation of an annotation system for high-throughput dose-response experiments

One of the common strategies to identify novel chemical matter in drug discovery consists in performing a High Throughput Screening (HTS). However, the large amount of data generated at the dose-response (DR) step of an HTS campaign requires a careful analysis to detect artifacts and correct erroneous datapoints before validating the experiments. This step which requires to review each DR experiment can be time consuming and prone to human errors or inconsistencies. AI4DR is a system that has been developed for the classification of DR curves based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) acting on normalized images of the DR curves. AI4DR allows the annotation in minutes of thousands of curves among 14 categories to help the High Throughput Screening biologists in their analyses. Several categories are associated with active and inactive compounds, other categories correspond to features of interest such as the presence of noise, a weaker effect at high doses, or a suspiciously weak or strong slope at the inflexion point of the DR curves of actives. The classifier has been trained on an algorithmically generated dataset curated and refined by experts, tested using real screening campaigns and improved using thousands of annotations by experts. The solution is deployed using a MLFlow model server interfaced with the Genedata Screener data analysis software used by the end users. AI4DR improves the consistency, the robustness, and the speed of HTS data analysis as well as reducing the human effort to identify faster new medicines for patients.