Good heavens, but it takes a long time to get a new medicine in use. To go from first concept to everyday pharmaceutical use in the high street can take from 10 to 15 years on average. There’s all that Discovery and Initial research: followed by Preclinical Testing, Clinical Trials, and Regulatory Review. Quite right too: we support all this red tape , as there no point in killing the people (or animals) we’re trying to cure. Occasionally things are permitted to speed up (think mRNA vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic) But we admit the whole thing can be a tad frustrating, particularly for a blog like this one, ever campaigning for new forms of antibiotic and other ways to combat resistant micro-organisms,
Which is why we support every endeavour to speed the process of drug development up. None more so than when its exponents try fresh thinking, as the ingenious Dr Alex Shalek of MITI. Read this AI offers drug-screening shortcut from Nature Briefing
An artificial intelligence (AI) model trained on complex data from human cells could bypass the need for time-consuming drug-screening in the race to develop new medicines. The model, called DrugReflector, was trained on data about how each of nearly 9,600 chemical compounds perturbs gene activity in more than 50 kinds of cell. Researchers found that DrugReflector was up to 17 times more effective at finding compounds that could affect the generation of certain blood cells than standard screening, which depends on randomly selecting compounds from a chemical library.Nature | 4 min read
Reference: Science paper
Dr Shalek and his admirable team think they have accelerated the process by anything between 13 and 17 times, as you will discover if you drill down on the links which we have provided.
It’s easy to bemoan the modern trend for instant narcissistic gratification, where every want is satisfied by the click of a button and a funny little man showing up in a blue van a few hours later. Of course it is essential to test new drugs, and maintain the high standards which we in the educated community hold ourselves to. You can’t run a drugs company at the same moral and intellectual level that you run a popular newspaper. But anything that speeds things up safely, as this technique appears to do, will save many lives and much suffering. We hope we’ve cheered up your morning break.
#drug development #medicine #health #AI #research #mRNA vaccine
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