Artificial Intelligence is being used to treat and tackle the most deadly parasites, diseases that are developing all over the world, and declared by the tech company, DeepMind AI.
There is a London-based Alphabet lab owned that is going to work with the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDI) to treat Leishmaniasis and Chagas disease.
Scientists have spent so many years in laboratories for mapping protein structures. But last year, DeepMind’s AlphaFold program and somehow was able to achieve the same accuracy in some days.
As of now one of biology’s biggest mysteries is largely solved by AI, a Protein structure that is key to heart muscle that is defective. There are so many diseases that are linked with the roles of proteins in catalyzing chemical reactions in enzymes, acting as a messenger to chemicals such as insulin in hormones, and creating antibodies to fight diseases.
For this one must be knowing the 3 Dimensional structure of a protein and is important in developing treatments for deadly diseases, and also includes cancer, dementia, and infectious diseases.
Pushmeet Kohli head of AI-for-science in DeepMind said that they are excited with the potential of this technology to help in fulfilling the gaps to understand the biology and speedup the scientific research to enable a new way of effective treatment for diseases and the company decided to focus on underserved and neglected areas for research.
The company also mentioned that they hope that AlphaFold is going to have a real-world impact on their understanding of disease and the discovery of a drug for communities who require such treatment.
Chagas and Leishmaniasis disease is affecting 23 million people worldwide and repurposing the existing drugs that have proven ineffective. Some patients have some toxic side effects.
The development of new AI approaches for designing drugs for such diseases is a new challenge but if one sticks to the new AI techniques that can be applied and this holds great hope for the future. The company has been criticized in last recent years after its data from the health division was being transferred to its parental company google.
The AI program was used last year to map some Sars-Cov-2 virus proteins. The company used this to understand how the virus behaved and is planning to collaborate on tackling other diseases in the future.
