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| ByteDance wants to discover drugs with artificial intelligence |
TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is entering the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors to search for diversified businesses that rely on advertising and direct sales.
The company prides itself on its content algorithms, and according to its recruitment page, it has begun to look for talent for AI discovery in Mountain View, Shanghai and Beijing.
One of the job vacancies says: We are looking for candidates for our team to conduct cutting-edge research in drug discovery and manufacture with the support of artificial intelligence algorithms.
The drug discovery team is linked to the ByteDance artificial intelligence lab. The Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Department was established in 2016 to provide content services to ByteDance, such as the Chinese version of Tik Tok and Douyin.
Not surprisingly, laboratories are expanding their services into the pharmaceutical field, which can also benefit from machine learning technology that enables short videos.
ByteDance Artificial Intelligence Lab said: Given the multitude of areas of research in AI, the application of these new technologies can be found in every section of our product line.
All open positions in drug discovery require a PhD in related disciplines such as computer science, mathematics, computational biology, and computational chemistry.
According to the post, the candidate is involved in drug development work such as: design, identification, and simulation.
Other Chinese tech giants have taken similar steps in the healthcare sector.
Tencent's pharmaceuticals team (which also accepts the company's AI lab) has been actively publishing results since at least August 2019.
Baidu planned to raise $ 2 billion for a new biotech company focused on drug discovery and AI diagnostics, according to a Reuters report in September.
Huawei has also made drug discovery and medical imaging efforts through its cloud computing department.