“Google has built an artificial intelligence laboratory assistant to help scientists accelerate biomedical research, as companies race to create specialised applications from the cutting-edge technology.

The US tech group’s so-called co-scientist tool helps researchers identify gaps in their knowledge and propose new ideas that could speed up scientific discovery…

Early tests of Google’s new tool with experts from Stanford University, Imperial College London and Houston Methodist hospital found it was able to generate scientific hypotheses that showed promising results.

The tool was able to reach the same conclusions — for a novel gene transfer mechanism that helps scientists understand the spread of antimicrobial resistance — as a new breakthrough from researchers at Imperial.

Imperial’s results were not in the public domain as they were being peer-reviewed in a top scientific journal. This showed that Google’s co-scientist tool was able to reach the same hypothesis using AI reasoning in a matter of just days, compared with the years the university team spent researching the problem.

The AI tool was also able to help researchers at Stanford find existing drugs that could be repurposed to treat liver fibrosis, a serious disease where scar tissue builds up in the organ. Google’s co-scientist suggested two drug types that the Stanford scientists found helped with treating the illness.”

From Financial Times.