The first vaccine will soon be developed by AI in the world

A team of researchers at Flinder University in South Australia has developed a new vaccine that is believed to be the first drug in the world to be completely designed with artificial intelligence (AI).

Although the drugs were previously designed by computers, this vaccine has advanced one step further by being independently created by an AI program called SAM .

Flinder Nikolai Petrovsky University professor, the head of the project, said the name of the AI ​​program derived from what it was given was to find a better drug for humans.

The vaccine developed by AI will be a new important step.

"We have to teach the AI ​​program about a set of compounds known to activate the human immune system and a set of inactive compounds. The AI's job is then to find out what kind of compound it is. Different medicine.

Later, we developed another program, called a synthetic chemist, to create trillions of different chemical compounds that we then provided to SAM to be able to find all. Candidates who think it might be a good immune drug for humans , 'Petrovsky said.

The team produced SAM 's 'top candidates' to identify, synthesize them in the laboratory and test them on human blood cells to see if they work.

"This confirms that SAM is not only able to identify good drugs but in fact has found better immune drugs for humans compared to the present. We have taken the drugs created by SAM. To develop with animal testing to confirm the ability to improve the effectiveness of influenza vaccines , 'Nikolai Petrovsky stressed.

If true success, this new development is capable of shortening the process of discovering and developing conventional drugs for decades and saving hundreds of millions of dollars.

"We know from animal testing that vaccines are highly resistant to influenza, superior to existing vaccines. Now we just need to confirm this in humans , " Petrovsky said. .

New AI vaccines appear at the same time as the large number of flu-related cases in Australia. Before June 2019, 228 people died of flu-related complications, including 57 in New South Wales and 48 in Victoria.

Petrovsky hopes this vaccine will prove to be more effective than existing vaccines and will continue to supplement or replace them as standard seasonal flu vaccines.