Experts at the virtual discussion held by WISH.
Doha: The World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) of Qatar Foundation has brought together experts from various fields of the World Health Organization (WHO) to discuss how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and bioinformatics could support the modification of already-approved medicines to provide more speedy solutions for illnesses including COVID-19.
The virtual event, ‘Calculating the Cure: AI and COVID-19’, was held as part of Qatar Foundation’s contribution to Global Goals Week.
“If you have 20,000 approved drugs on the market and want to test each of them in a clinical setting for a set of patients, it would cost billions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours, and it’s almost unrealistic to do that,” said Dr. Raghvendra Mall, a scientist at Qatar Computer and Research Institute.
“AI models can help, such as through screening and helping to prioritise which of these 20,000 drugs will potentially be most suitable in blocking diseases such as COVID-19, and this is what we are trying to do. The goal is to find which set of drugs can be tried first and that are most likely to be effective, and this is where different machine learning models can be used to reach a consensus,” he added.
He also highlighted that the costs and the time associated with bringing an approved drug onto the market are almost half of that required for a novel compound.
“There have been many success stories in drug repurposing, especially in oncology and cancer, and while AI based drug repurposing is relatively new, there is a plethora of researchers and biotech companies trying to integrate multiple layers of information and pass them to machine learning and deep learning-based modes, so they can repurpose drugs to treat other diseases,” said Dr. Mall.
The discussion was moderated by WISH’s Head of Content, Maha El Akoum, and the discussion heard from speakers including Senior Scientist at Qatar Biomedical Research Institute, Dr. Prasanna Kolatkar; Chief Information Officer at WHO, Bernardo Mariano Junior; and Director at the University of Edinburgh’s Usher Institute, Professor Aziz Sheikh.
Bernardo Mariano Junior said that health data is one of the major gaps in the global health sector, and a governance framework that allows data scientists to help speed the response to diseases.
“WHO is the custodian of data from its 194 member states, so the question is whether countries would be willing to share data with us for global good and ensure an AI-supported device can mine it to deliver better results and learn more through machine learning algorithms,” he said.
“Alongside helping data scientists, we also need to protect the privacy and confidentiality of data to bring trust to the ecosystem, for us to be able to reap all the benefits of data and digital technologies,” he added.
