The Exploratory Science Center consists of interdisciplinary scientific groups, including biologists, chemists, and data scientists.
[20][21] The Exploratory Science Center sits as a major component to the parent company Merck & Co. strategy of regional innovation hubs located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, San Francisco, and London.
[23] ESC scientists collaborated with researchers at Princeton University to develop visible-light-based techniques to map protein interactions on cell surfaces.
[26] This line of research was aimed at identifying drug targets using visible-light-based photocatalytic methods to interrogate cell surface protein microenvironments.
[28][29] The ESC research site has demonstrated an interest in natural product drug discovery using machine learning and genome mining approaches.
This work included the development of an open source tool named DeepBGC, which provided a machine learning approach to biosynthetic gene cluster identification.