Dominic Tyer writes:

Merck & Co has become the latest pharma company to bring gamification to its clinical research by tapping into online scientific research community Kaggle.

Merck launched the Merck Molecular Activity Challenge, with its $40,000 prize fund, in August to assist its drug development work by predicting molecular activity.

The competition was won by a team of three US academics, who beat 15 other teams to identify the best statistical technique for predicting biological activity of different molecules.

It was based on 15 molecular activity data sets, each for a biologically relevant target and each row corresponded to a molecule and contains descriptors derived from that molecule’s chemical structure.

See on www.pmlive.com