While millions of Americans benefit from new medications to alleviate the symptoms of a variety of ailments, the long and expensive drug creation process can miss many side effects. And this causes about 100 thousand deaths each year. Now researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have discovered a high tech way to use supercomputers to identify proteins that cause medications to have certain adverse drug reactions.

"The whole goal of the project is to see if we can, basically using computational chemistry, which is used routinely to screen drugs to identify them as initial candidates, can we use those same tools and approaches to identify or red flag these problems up front."

That’s Montiago LaBute, an applied statistician at the Lab who is collaborating on this project.

"We kind of have this really nice environment where we’re sort of pushing the envelope in terms of computing in terms of new algorithmic techniques and then beyond that, take it to some place where pharmaceutical companies can use these approaches in order to expedite their development process."