Digital filter could speed up the drug discovery process

Garth Simpson, a professor of analytical and physical chemistry at Purdue’s College of Science, has created a digital filter to help facilitate moving drugs to clinical trials quicker by creating more exact measurements early in the development stage. The filter uses mathematical formulas to analyse and organise the data into useable sets for researchers and drug developers. It can be used for measurements in chromatography, microscopy and triboluminescence, all of which are used in the early stages of drug development to determine which molecules show the greatest potential to move ahead to clinical trials.
Mr Simpson said: “Our latest development is this novel filter design for digital deconvolution that helps us remove timing artefacts arising from the response function of the instrument we are using for data acquisition. Our digital filter approach only requires that a user have the data. Our filter and algorithm then use non-negative matrix factorisation over short sections of data to allow the analysis of data sets that are too large to be characterised by other conventional approaches.”