Japanese research team develops AI that can spot possible coronavirus drugs.
- ByStartupStory | September 28, 2021
Researchers in Japan discovered a way to quickly search through a wide variety of chemicals for medicines that can treat medical conditions. It says that they have developed an AI program that determined a candidate drug for the new coronavirus.
Researchers at the Medical Institute of Bioregulation of Kyushu University led by Distinguished Professor Nakayama Keiichi announced the development.
It takes time and effort to discover candidate drugs using conventional mainstream methods that involve testing many chemicals one by one. According to the group, its AI developed a solution to curb the effects of more than 2.5 million pathogenic proteins and chemicals. Researchers say that the system can now identify suitable drug candidates from 6,000 kinds of chemicals per minute.
The group claims the program came up with a candidate drug for Coronavirus as a former glaucoma medicine. In the study, the drug was proven to be effective in blocking viral infection in cultured cells. The AI system, according to Nakayama, can identify candidate medicines 10,000 times faster than humans. Aside from faster and easier development of drugs for cancer and other diseases, he hopes this program will also accelerate the development of drugs for other illnesses.
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