A group such as Kyushu University has announced that it has developed a new method for finding therapeutic agents for diseases at high speed using AI = artificial intelligence from a huge number of chemical substances.
The group says that it was able to find a substance that suppresses the infection of the new coronavirus using this AI.
This was announced by a group of Professor Keiichi Nakayama of the Institute of Biodefense Medicine, Kyushu University.
Currently, when searching for a candidate for a therapeutic drug, the method of examining each of many chemical substances by experiment is the mainstream, but the problem is that it takes time and effort.
The group has developed a system that allows AI to predict therapeutic drug candidates at high speed by having AI learn more than 2.5 million combinations of proteins that cause diseases and chemical substances that suppress the action of those proteins.
When the group asked this AI to search for a drug that could be used to treat the new coronavirus, a drug that had been used as a therapeutic drug for glaucoma in the past was listed as a candidate, and an experiment using cultured cells revealed that the new corona was infected. It means that the effect of suppressing it was confirmed.
This system can examine about 6000 kinds of chemical substances per minute, and Professor Nakayama said, "AI can search for therapeutic drug candidates 10,000 times faster than humans. Other diseases such as cancer. I hope that it will be possible to develop drugs faster and easier because it can also be used for. "