Artificial intelligence is inventing new drugs against Parkinson's disease, antibiotic-resistant superbugs and many rare diseases – progress that many scientists never dreamed possible.
Collins and his team trained a generative AI model to recognise the chemical structures of known antibiotics. This allowed the algorithm to learn what it takes to kill bacteria.
The researchers then used the AI to screen more than 45 million different chemical structures for their ability to target Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacteria that cause gonorrhoea, and Staphylococcus aureus, a significant source of infections in the form of MRSA.
In 2024, Vendruscolo and his colleagues published a study where they used machine learning to search for potential drug candidates able to target the clumps of misfolded proteins in the brain that occur in Parkinson's patients.
The power of AI is that it can very quickly narrow down that search. They ended up identifying five promising new compounds more quickly and effectively than conventional approaches.
At Harvard Medical School, an AI model found nearly 8,000 approved drugs that could potentially be repurposed to treat 17,000 different diseases.
And AI is proving particularly useful in finding treatments for rare diseases that are often overlooked by pharmaceutical companies, due to the lack of financial incentive afforded by so few potential patients.
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