If a group of people are discussing jobs and career paths, you are bound to hear the word ‘data science’ more than once. Data science has become a very popular career choice for the young and the old because it is an in-demand skill that can be applied in many areas. Data science, together with business analytics and research, can truly create a revolution.
What is Drug Discovery? Understanding the Basics
In simple language, ‘drug discovery’ means creating new and better candidate medications than the ones currently available. This is a highly important field because it has a huge effect on human health, life sciences, and medical research.
Pharmaceutical companies invest hefty amounts in the process of drug discovery. The process needs a lot of capital, resources, data, and analysis. Here’s how data science can help in the process.
Can Data Science Help in Drug Discovery?
Data science is essentially a process of finding useful information from large amounts of data. Only some things from a data set are going to be valuable. One has to analyze the data and separate the essential information from it. That’s what data science does through its tools and techniques.
In drug discovery, a lot of data is generated. It could be related to clinical trial results, molecular structures, genomics, and so on. Data science can help in finding key information from this data that will help in creating new candidate medication.
3 Ways In Which Data Science Can Help In Drug Discovery
Here are 5 ways through which data science can be helpful in the process of drug discovery.
1. Detecting Patterns and Relationships From Data
Whenever a large dataset is compiled, researchers want to identify patterns from it. This helps in creating drugs that will help the most in managing the disease. Data science can help organize the huge amount of data collected from drug trials and lab tests to find patterns and relationships easily. This makes it easier to make changes in the drug designs and to identify the drugs that performed well and those that didn’t.
2. Predicting Results
Instead of doing drug trials on hundreds of people, it’s better to use statistics to predict which molecules would be more promising and which would not be that effective. This saves researchers precious time that they can spend on other useful work like further research. It also saves pharma companies a lot of funds otherwise spent on conducting trials and experiments on everything.
Data science has tools like ‘predictive modeling’ that can be used to anticipate in advance which molecules will be effective, which formulation will be safer for patients, and which ones can be toxic. Using predictive modeling, researchers can narrow down which test subjects are likely to have positive effects of the drugs in advance.
3. Creating Personalized Treatments
Data science is all about converting raw data into meaningful information. When it comes to drug discovery, data science can help predict which drugs will be useful for what type of patients and what type of diseases. When this happens, medical researchers can focus on creating medicines with fewer side effects. Similarly, doctors can then give more personalized treatments to their patients.
How do you enter the field of data science and drug discovery?
Sounds Interesting? Here’s how you can enter the field of data science and drug discovery.
You can kickstart your data science journey with online data science courses. Through these fully virtual courses, you can get in-depth knowledge about data science, its tools, and real-life applications from the comfort of your own. No need to go live in an expensive city to learn from reputed universities anymore!
Here are 3 data science courses through which you can get the required knowledge of data science.
1. Master of Data Science (Global) Program
This is an in-depth master’s degree in data sciences offered by Deakin University, a globally recognized institution. You can also get a PG Certificate from the University of Texas, Austin, and Great Lakes Executive Learning. This is a 24-month-long course with hands-on projects. It is highly cost-effective and will be completed in 1/10th of the cost of getting a degree.
2. PG Program in Data Science and Engineering
This is a great program for those who have recently graduated and are looking to start a career in the field of data science and drug discovery. You will get a certificate from Great Lakes Executive Learning that you can showcase on your resume to demonstrate your knowledge of data science. This is a Certificate course that goes on for 9 months.
3. Data Analytics Bootcamp Program
This program is great for those newly starting their career in data science. You can attend live classes in selected cities and online classes from other locations. It only takes 4 months to finish this course. It will provide you with knowledge about data analysis tools like Excel, SQL, Python, and more.
Business Analytics and Data Science
Business analytics is closely related to data science. It is a field of analyzing organizational data, historical trends, and past business performance to help in business decision-making. If you know business analytics, you will find it easier to take raw data and use data science to analyze it such that it is useful in making company decisions. Check this data science and business analytics course so that you get to explore both data science and business analytics.
This business analytics course combines data science and business analytics to give you an edge when applying for jobs. After finishing it, you can get a dual certificate from the University of Texas at Austin and the Great Lakes Executive Learning. You will learn best practices in data science, business analytics, and Power BI training in this 1-year long program online.
Bottom Line
Data science has proven to be useful in almost all industries, and the drug discovery industry is no different. Data science can help in extracting useful information about effective molecules that can be used to create new drugs. It also helps in analyzing which candidates showed better responses to various medications. Start your journey today by enrolling in the best data science course offered by Great Learning.
