Creating a Virtual Assistant for Medicinal Chemistry.

The virtual assistant concept is one that many technology companies have taken on despite having other well-developed and popular user interfaces. We wondered whether it would be possible to create an effective virtual assistant for a medicinal chemistry organization, the key being delivering the information the user would want to see, directly to them, at the right time. We introduce Kernel, an early prototype virtual assistant created at Lilly, and a number of examples of the scenarios that have been implemented to try to demonstrate the concept. A biochemical assay summary email is described that brings together new results and some basic analysis, delivered within an hour of new data appearing for that assay, and an email delivering new compound design ideas directly to the original submitter of a compound shortly after their compound was tested for the first time. We conclude with a high level description of the first example of a Design-Make-Test-Analyze cycle completed in the absence of any human intellectual input at Lilly. We believe that this concept has much potential in changing the way that computational results and analysis are delivered and consumed within a medicinal chemistry group, and we hope to inspire others to implement their own similar solutions.