• Huawei Cloud's Pangu Drug Molecule Model Accelerates New Drug Discovery From Years to Just One Month
• Dubai to host the Huawei Connect 2022 Second Stop During GITEX Global 

 The 7th annual flagship event for the global ICT industry, Huawei Connect 2022 began yesterday in Bangkok, Thailand. The theme of this year's event is "Unleash Digital", gathering over 10,000 ICT industry leaders, experts, and partners from around the world to explore how to more effectively unleash digital productivity, promote the digital economy, and build up stronger digital ecosystems.

At the event, Huawei shared the steps it's taking to advance digital development across a wide range of industries and released 15+ innovative cloud services for the global market.

Kicking off the event, Ken Hu, Huawei's Rotating Chairman, delivered a keynote outlining three ways the ICT ecosystem can help break through common barriers in digital transformation:

• Boost digital infrastructure, including more robust connectivity and stronger, more diverse computing resources.
• Help organizations go beyond simple cloud adoption and truly make the most of cloud, focusing on advanced technology services that drive leapfrog development.
• Build out local digital ecosystems, including partner development, strengthening the digital talent pool, and providing more support for SMEs.

At the event, Zhang Ping’an, CEO of Huawei Cloud, unveiled the "Go Cloud, Go Global" ecosystem plan, and reaffirmed the commitment to Everything as a Service. Jacqueline Shi, President of Huawei Cloud's Global Marketing and Sales Service, said that Huawei Cloud will launch more than 15 innovations globally, covering cloud native, AI development, data governance, digital content, software development, and MacroVerse aPaaS.

At the event, Ken Hu also spoke about how the First Affiliated Hospital of the Medical School at Xi'an Jiaotong University used AI to expedite pharmaceutical R&D and new drug discovery.

In the pharmaceutical industry, an average of over 1 billion USD and 10 years is needed to put a new drug on the market, from development to approval. While developing antibiotics, it has been noted that resistant bacteria are sometimes discovered even before newly developed antibiotics finish clinical trials.

By using an AI-aided drug design service powered by Huawei Cloud's Pangu Drug Molecule Model, Professor Liu Bing of the First Affiliated Hospital of the Medical School at Xi'an Jiaotong University and his team developed a new broad-spectrum antimicrobial drug in just one month, and R&D costs were slashed by 70%.

A major challenge in new drug discovery lies in the screening of hundreds of millions of existing drug molecules. Traditionally, drug screening was performed by experts in labs, which was costly, slow, and had a high failure rate.

The Huawei Cloud Pangu Drug Molecule Model has been trained using the data of 1.7 billion drug-life molecules and can predict the physicochemical properties of drug compounds and score them based on their druglikeness. Researchers can then do targeted experiments to verify drug compounds that have the highest scores.

Moreover, the Pangu Drug Molecule Model's molecular structure optimizer can be used to optimize the structure of lead compounds, minimizing the potential side effects of the new drugs on normal human cells.

Today, cloud has become an important carrier for digital companies. Huawei Cloud provides four development pipelines, including ModelArts the AI development pipeline, which customers and partners from all industries can access on demand, so they can leave the technical side of digital innovation to Huawei Cloud, and concentrate more on what matters most to them.

According to Ken Hu, organizations should embrace the cloud for leapfrog development as digital smart tech is the future. Huawei Cloud has integrated more than 240 services and more than 50,000 APIs to bring the latest AI, application development, and big data technologies and development tools to the cloud. The innovation and expertise of Huawei Cloud will help more organizations move to the cloud faster and better.

The three-day conference in Bangkok is the first stop on HUAWEI CONNECT's global tour in 2022. Featuring two keynote sessions, six summits, as well as multiple breakout sessions and demos, this year's event dives into the challenges that governments and enterprises face at all stages of their digital transformation journey, Huawei's advancements in digital infrastructure, as well as the company's latest cloud services and ecosystem partner solutions.

For the first time in the Middle East, Huawei will introduce its Huawei CONNECT global event to Dubai,. The 2nd stop of Huawei Connect 2022 will be running in parallel with GITEX GLOBAL 2022 on October 11th and 12th at Madinat Jumeirah. At the event, Huawei will cover industry digitalization and the opportunities it brings, and how technologies like AI, Cloud and 5G are uncovering fresh value across all industries.

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