U of T researchers used AI to discover a potential new cancer drug — in less than a month

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U of T researchers used AI to discover a potential new cancer drug — in less than a month. The project used a revolutionary program to identify a weak point in liver cancer cells and synthesize a drug to attack it.

Insilico said it’s currently not interested in pursuing clinical trials for the potential drug; it’ll leave that for other researchers to follow now that the molecule has been publicly identified. Instead, the main purpose of the study was to serve as a “proof of concept” of what is now possible with AI, said Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a professor of computer science and chemistry at U of T, director of the Acceleration Consortium and the co-principal investigator who led the study.

Released in 2021, AlphaFold is a revolutionary AI program developed by Google’s DeepMind researchers. It solves one of the greatest puzzles in biochemistry: predicting what proteins look like solely based on their DNA blueprints. In the brief time the program has been out, it’s already identified the structures of— providing an invaluable resource for researchers in life science and biology in general.

After that, it was relatively simple process of feeding CDK20’s structure into another of Insilico’s AI programs to design drugs that can take down the protein, Aspuru-Guzik continued. This allows the program to “scan very broadly for weak spots, not just a single one … It’s AI’s ability to tie together which means that you can now throw a net very broadly and catch things” humans might otherwise miss, he said.It’s better to have multiple good options to try than a single excellent one, Levitt continued, given how easily things go wrong in clinical trials. Just because a drug works on cultured cells doesn’t mean it’ll work as well inside the body: “It may have side effects.

 

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I hate when your hoping , praying for something, read of such promise,then the heartbreak of no trials.😢

The only problem t ingredients are available on a earthlike planet 11 light years away. AI knws that for it knows everything to be known in universe. Ask it if there is God? Or maybe AIU is God. Ask it that too. Humanity, the way we are going will AI itself to extinction. Ask it

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