Repurposing Drugs with AI

 

In our recent class discussion on AI’s impact on healthcare, I became intrigued by its role in pharmacy practice. Specifically, I wanted to look into how AI is revolutionizing drug repurposing which is a method to find alternative uses for drugs in a faster, safer, and more cost-effective way.

One notable drug repurpose I was able to find was when researchers were finding treatments for COVID-19. Due to the COVID-19 cases rising so quickly, a solution had to be figured out fast, so researchers turned to AI to explore potential drug options to treat the virus. The AI pulled data from PubMed and DrugBank databases, it then went through large amounts of data and thousands of drugs, and generated a list of 41 potential drugs that could be effective. This way, researchers are able to spend more time investigating those drugs and truly identify an effective treatment instead of trying to narrow down thousands of drugs by themselves. A few drugs on this list were dexamethasone, indomethacin, and baricitinib which have other uses that we have learned but all three of those are now used for treatment or symptom relief of COVID-19. Before the pandemic, baricitinib was used for rheumatoid arthritis, but they found from AI that it had properties to inhibit the activity of AAK1, so now it has become the first immunomodulatory treatment for COVID-19 to receive FDA approval. 

Repurposing drugs with AI is still in the beginning stages of discovery but has already had a few notable success stories. As the AI machines learn, we will be able to accelerate drug discovery and improve human health greatly.

 

Reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8783773/

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