In response to the new crown virus, a global drug research and development competition is held
We know that drug research and development takes a long process, ranging from several years to more than ten years. In order to speed up the progress, “AI + drug development” may help.
A simple explanation of the development of new AI drugs is to use AI to perform “virtual” screening of 5000-10,000 compounds. That is, instead of doing part of the experiment, use the database for analysis, greatly speeding up the development progress.
The star companies on this track are Insilico, Atomwise, Numerate, BenevolentAI, etc. Some domestic companies are also at the forefront of the world, including Ice Island Stone Biology and Jingtai Technology.
Recently, “Sage Health” in San Francisco, USA has set up a medical data platform to help treat, prevent and cure various diseases by mining the value of data.
Sage Health founder Siraj Raval told Sage Health that Sage Health was recently established this month and plans to provide health data solutions to help relevant medical institutions or businesses through volunteer services and paid programs.
From the perspective of product architecture, the value of Sage Health’s data is mainly reflected in five segments:
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Bioinformatics: Human health data is multi-dimensional, complex, and difficult to organize. Algorithms designed by Sage Health can use biomarkers to make accurate health predictions. There is no limit to the number of biomarkers; < / p>
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Medical imaging: Computer vision technology has developed rapidly in the past few years. Sage Health has built auxiliary diagnostic tools that are suitable for many departments such as cardiology and orthopedics;
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Electronic health file mining: under the premise of protecting patient privacy, Sage Health uses secure tools to mine text data in order to create analysis boards, dialog systems, etc.;
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AI drug development: Machine learning has proven to greatly accelerate the virtual screening process over the past few years, and Sage Health helped design small molecule drugs, as well as gene and cell therapies;
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Surgical robots: Using a combination of computer vision and control theory, Sage Health designs software for surgical equipment such as DaVinci surgical robots.
Among them, the outbreak of the new crown virus has made the development of AI drugs the first application. In the face of the epidemic, scientists are still working to develop symptomatic drugs. How to shorten the development time? AI drug development is a feasible solution.
The “accelerated” approach is to find drug candidates with high binding affinity to the COVID-2019 main protease. Use machine learning to identify potential candidate proteins, and then use software to calculate their binding affinity to the main protease. Some studies have shown that HIV antiviral drugs have a good effect, but this is still an open field of drug discovery and more scientists are needed to join.
Based on this, Sage Health recently launched a new crown drug development competition, and welcomes people with lofty ideals from all over the world to join this research and development and jointly explore effective drug molecules. The competition ends in early March. At that time, Sage Health will determine the ranking based on the reproducibility of the candidate molecule, the quality of the literature, and the antiviral feasibility. The platform will give the winners cash, JetML cloud points and other rewards, and Sage Health will award the selected drugs. The samples were donated to Wuhan Virology Research for further analysis.
