AI Is Smart Enough To Develop New Vaccines For Humans By Itself

While humans have made great efforts to develop new kinds of drugs to save more lives out of the deadly diseases, AI (artificial intelligence) can now do the same thing.

Along with the growing development of AI technology, more and more developers have recently focused much on looking for solutions that leverage artificial intelligence to research new drugs. The good news is that one among these AIs has itself succeeded in creating a flu vaccine – completely without any support from humans.

The name of this extraordinary AI is Smart Algorithms for Medical Discovery (or SAM). It is designed by researchers from the Flinders University in Australia.

In an interview with Business Insider Australia, one of the Flinders researchers named Nikolai Petrovsky revealed that they provided the AI SAM with a lot of information relating to chemical compounds that are able to trigger the immune systems of humans. In addition, information on compounds that don’t affect it is included.

In the next step, the researchers built a computer program which could create a thousand billions of chemical compounds. SAM’s mission was to detect what kinds of these compounds would probably be suitable for new drug development.

And then, they combined some of the most outstanding candidates detected by SAM and conducted a series of tests on these chemical compounds on blood cells in the laboratory. Fortunately, a flu vaccine managed to show its surprising effectiveness in animals.

This new vaccine has been under clinical trials in human patients in the United States. If the results are feasible, we humans can hope the brighter future will have fewer cases of flu, as well as more drugs that are developed by AIs.