“Artificial intelligence is inventing new drugs against Parkinson’s disease, antibiotic-resistant superbugs and many rare diseases – progress that many scientists never dreamed possible…
‘We can – in a matter of days or hours – look at massive libraries’ of chemical compounds to identify those that display antibacterial activity, says James Collins, professor of medical engineering and science, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, US. With the help of AI, Collins and his team have already discovered two new compounds that could prove vital weapons against the highly drug-resistant infections gonorrhoea and MRSA…
Progress on Parkinson’s
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Michele Vendruscolo, professor in biophysics and co-director of the Centre for Misfolding Diseases at the University of Cambridge in the UK … and his colleagues published a study where they used machine learning – a form of artificial intelligence – to search for potential drug candidates able to target the clumps of misfolded proteins in the brain that occur in Parkinson’s patients. The aggregations of proteins, known as Lewy bodies, are thought to play a role in the initial stages of neurodegeneration in Parkinson’s patients, eventually leading to symptoms including tremors, slowness of movement and muscle stiffness…
Vendruscolo’s AI-suggested compounds were then tested in the lab. ‘We measured which of the candidates were actually binding [to the Lewy bodies], and we fed this information back into the machine learning program, so it could learn from its own mistakes,’ he says.
They ended up identifying five promising new compounds more quickly and effectively than conventional approaches. The compounds identified by the AI were also far more novel than would have been found using more traditional drug development methods, says Vendruscolo. They are now undergoing further testing to assess whether they could one day be offered as a therapeutic to Parkinson’s patients.
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New uses for old drugs
David Fajgenbaum, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in the US, managed to save his own life with an existing drug that doctors would never have prescribed him…
His experience opened his eyes to the potential that exists in the many thousands of drugs that have already been through the extensive safety testing required to make it to market. By repurposing these drugs to treat other conditions, patients get treatments they would not have otherwise.
In 2022, Fajgenbaum set up a nonprofit called Every Cure, using machine learning to compare thousands of drugs against thousands of diseases. The most promising are tested in laboratories or sent to doctors who are willing to experiment.
But while Faigenbaum is the most prominent scientist to have leveraged AI in this way, others are already making breakthroughs. At Harvard Medical School, an AI model found nearly 8,000 approved drugs that could potentially be repurposed to treat 17,000 different diseases.”
From BBC.