Can AI help find a cure for coronavirus?
Artificial intelligence may have been hyped – but when it comes to medicine, it already has a proven track record.
So can machine learning rise to this challenge of finding a cure for this terrible disease?
There is no shortage of companies trying to solve the dilemma.
Oxford-based Exscientia, the first to put an AI-discovered drug into a human trial, is trawling through 15,000 drugs held by the Scripps research institute, in California.
It feels as if a superhuman effort is needed to help ease the global pandemic killing so many.
And Healx, a Cambridge company set up by Viagra co-inventor Dr. David Brown, has repurposed its AI system developed to find drugs for rare diseases.
The system is divided into three parts that..
- Trawl through all the current literature relating to the disease
- Study the DNA and structure of the virus
- Consider the suitability of various drugs
Drug discovery has traditionally been slow.
“I have been doing this for 45 years and I have got three drugs to market,” Dr. Brown told BBC News.
But AI is proving much faster.
Read the complete article By Jane Wakefield, Technology reporter: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52120747
