AI technology helps to shorten the speed of amazing vaccine preparation

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is changing the entire pharmaceutical industry . This technology can help save the time and money needed to develop new drugs to treat Covid-19 and other dangerous diseases through its ability to quickly identify the most promising drugs.

For the Covid-19 epidemic, AI software helped a pharmaceutical company successfully develop a drug to treat the SARS-CoV-2 virus and was approved in the US in just 9 months, an amazing speed.

A British AI startup called BenevolentAI identified baricitinib , a drug developed by Eli Lilly that helps treat rheumatoid arthritis, as effective in treating Covid-19 in just a few days. This drug has been approved as a treatment for Covid-19 in the US and Japan. The European Medicines Agency has also conducted a review of baricitinib in the treatment of coronavirus.

Once the target protein has been identified, the AI ​​will find a drug that can act on them.

The team of experts worked with the company's most advanced AI BenevolentAI to find an approved drug that could be repurposed for the treatment of Covid-19. This approach helps pharmaceutical companies bypass FDA approval to use emergency drugs to treat patients hospitalized with Covid-19 in just 9 months, instead of years like the way. usual approach. Finding a new drug often requires multiple candidate studies and animal trials to test their safety.

BenevolentAI's technology identifies drugs with the most potential through data from clinical studies, scientific reports and databases of diseases, genes and pharmacodynamics. Once the target protein has been identified, the AI ​​will find a drug that can act on them.

The application of AI in drug research and development is expected to significantly reduce the time needed to create a new drug, a process that normally takes between 9 and 17 years.

In February 2020, just as WHO declared the Covid-19 epidemic as a global emergency, the first study by BenevolentAI on the use of baricitinib in the treatment of Covid-19 was published in the Lancet. This drug has the ability to prevent the virus from infecting lung cells and thereby reducing pneumonia.

Eli Lilly, the company that holds the patent for the drug baricitinib, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases conducted a study in the US to test the effectiveness and safety of this drug in the treatment of Patients hospitalized due to Covid-19. Because study results showed that baricitinib could shorten recovery time and improve symptoms in patients with Covid-19, the FDA approved emergency use of the drug in November 2020. According to data published by Eli Lilly, baricitinib was able to reduce mortality by up to 38% in hospitalized patients when used in combination with remdesivir, an antiviral drug.

BenevolentAI also researches and develops its own drugs, which focus on drugs to treat more than 10 diseases including atopic dermatitis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

The company began clinical trials of the drug for atopic dermatitis in February 2021. The company also partnered with AstraZeneca to develop drugs for chronic kidney disease.

AI has been applied in pharmaceutical research and development around the world. Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma has partnered with Exscientia , a startup that uses AI for drug research, to find a drug with potential in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. Last year, the company began a clinical trial of the drug in Japan to determine its safety.

"Thanks to the use of AI, the process of finding a new drug takes less than a year, while normally this process can take up to 4.5 years," said an expert at Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma. In May 2021, the company began Phase 1 clinical trials of the drug to treat Alzheimer's disease in the US after being developed by Exscientia's AI technology.

AI does not completely replace humans in all stages.

However, AI does not completely replace humans in all stages. Their job is to find the most promising drug and to extract the formula from a large amount of data from scientific and experimental studies. People will follow that direction to research and develop drugs.

Exscientia is attracting the attention of pharmaceutical and biological companies worldwide. Evotec, a German biomedical company, has been involved in the development of a new cancer treatment with Exscientia. According to Evotec, the A2a receptor antagonist has been in clinical trials in humans since April 2021. The two companies discovered the drug just eight months after the study began.

Japan's Taishio pharmaceutical company and Hong Kong's AI company Insilico Medicine have joined a research project since last fall to find a therapy to help slow down the aging process of cells. Insilico uses its AI network to identify therapeutic targets and find drug-like molecules that target aging cells. The accumulation of these cells as people age is thought to be responsible for a number of different diseases.

Insilico's mission is to find what's behind aging in specific cells, tissues and diseases, with different proteins associated with each target and molecular design that interferes with those targets. . Taiso will confirm the results from the computer with tests on glass dishes and on living organisms.

Several other Japanese AI startups also contribute to the success of the world's leading companies in the field of medicine. Hacarus, an AI company based in Kyoto, and the University of Tokyo have joined a drug research project for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Both diseases are caused by the accumulation of certain proteins in the brain. Using AI to develop drugs for these diseases is still quite rare in the world.

The goal of the project is within a year to create a system to more efficiently search for compounds that could be potential drugs. The AI-driven approach will "significantly improve the speed and accuracy of the research process , " said Taisuke Tomita, a professor at Tokyo University of Medical Sciences.

More than 120 companies and universities in Japan have participated in the Life Intelligence Consortium , a business-school partnership program aimed at applying AI to common sense science. This partnership has spawned about 20 AI program prototypes for pharmaceutical research and development.

"AI will soon become an essential technology in pharmaceutical research and development," said Yasushi Okuno, a professor at Kyoto University. The technology offers an opportunity to "revisit old knowledge that took 10 years to develop a new drug".

Therefore, each new drug that is created will be extremely expensive. According to estimates by Tufts University in the US, the average cost to develop a widely used prescription drug in the market was about $2.9 billion in the 2000s, at $180 million in the 1970s. . Drug research costs are rising faster than inflation.

Over the years, many new drugs have been developed, especially those for cancer and "lifestyle diseases" . Many important and pharmacological active ingredients have been discovered and prepared into medicines. As a result, it becomes extremely difficult to develop an effective new drug. And the need to ensure safety makes the research time longer for clinical trials.

According to the Japan Association of Pharmaceutical Companies, only about 30,000 potential compounds are actually used as drugs. The development process can take from 9 to 17 years. The cost for drug research and development of companies is about 10% of sales revenue per year, equivalent to 4% of the industry.

In an effort to find new treatments, pharmaceutical companies are devoting more resources to drug research using biotechnology - drugs with complex ingredients using living cells or microorganisms, are often created using advanced technology, such as drug-antibody combinations ADCs . The research process for biologic drugs is complex, and at the same time very expensive.

One of the biologics is Nivolumab, sold under the brand name Opdivo. The drug was first used in 2014 in Japan to treat many types of cancer, and at first it cost 35 million Japanese yen (about 7.3 billion VND) a year to distribute the drug. This makes it more difficult for the national health care fund when its outlays are already huge.

AI is one of a number of technologies that can reduce drug delivery costs by cutting research costs. Thereby increasing access to new treatments for incurable diseases and improving the quality of life for all.