AI vs. Wuhan Coronavirus
Artificial Intelligences are back at it. This time trying to save us from the Wuhan coronavirus. It is likely to still take at least a few months before we get a vaccine and until then we will gladly use the help of digital brains.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
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Vaccines Will Be Late
The official numbers for both the infected and dead because of the Wuhan coronavirus are rising rapidly. And many experts are afraid that the real numbers could be much higher. It is already clear that the Wuhan coronavirus will easily “beat” SARS from 2004.
The global concerns have already led us to start developing several different possible vaccines – including a promising RNA vaccine that is being developed by a company named Moderna and the American agency NIAID.
But at this point, the Wuhan coronavirus is advancing too quickly to have even the earliest of the coming vaccines stop it to any significant degree. Scientists and many pharmaceutical companies are trying to use already finished and available anti-viral drugs to at least slow down the Wuhan coronavirus. For example, according to available information, Gilead Sciences has been testing an experimental drug remdesivir on Chinese patients infected with the coronavirus. And very recently we heard about the use of the combination of drugs lopinavir/ritonavir (LPV/r) known as Kaletra that is being used to treat and prevent HIV in combination with an anti-viral drug oseltamivir (known as Tamiflu) that is well known to the public as a drug against the flu.
AI To The Rescue
An international team that included researchers from the Deargen company, the Korean Dankook University, and the American Emory University has decided to ask Artificial Intelligence for help. With its help, they searched for commercially available anti-viral drugs that could be effective against the Wuhan coronavirus. The link to their brand new study can be found in the sources.
As the research lead, Keunsoo Kang from the Dankook University says: initially it was just scientific curiosity. They just wanted to know if an AI would be capable of recommending drugs that could make life difficult for the Wuhan coronavirus. And their AI called MT-DTI (Molecule Transformer-Drug Target Interaction) was capable. This AI is trained to find the best drugs that target viral proteins. And in this case, in only searched among commercially available anti-viral drugs.
HIV & Flu Drugs May Be The Answer
MT-DTI claims that the most promising Wuhan coronavirus treatment out of commercially available anti-viral drugs is one called Atazanavir. This is a drug against retroviruses that is mainly used as a treatment and prevention against HIV. The MT-DTI AI indicates that the Atazanavir molecules should bond to several parts of the Wuhan coronavirus. It seems that this drug should sabotage all the sub-units of the Wuhan replication complex at the same time.
The other drugs in order of probable effectiveness are favirenz, ritonavir, and dolutegravir.
A big benefit of this approach is the fact that we do not need to test the drugs for safety on human patients. The drugs have already passed such tests. On the other hand, the predictions of the AI need to be tested on patients infected with the Wuhan coronavirus.
Sources:
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