I have a MSc in Industrial Biotechnology obtained at the University of Milan-Bicocca (Italy) in 2021. My main research interests are molecular modelling of protein-ligand interactions and Computer-Aided Drug Design.
Molecular docking is an in silico tool that allows us to predict the binding pose of a ligand with a protein target and at the same time estimates the binding affinity by using a Scoring Function (SF). However, in several cases the current SFs produce results that do not correlate satisfactorily with experimental results. This happens because most of them assume there is a linear relationship between the protein-ligand complex feature and the binding affinity, but this is not always true. My PhD project aims to derive a new scoring function by applying non-linear Machine Learning and Deep Learning models.