Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) have unveiled an incredibly powerful, AI-powered method to produce new potential Covid-19 vaccine candidates within minutes or even seconds.
The new process, developed at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, could be a major turning point in the information war against the coronavirus and its many, increasingly virulent mutations that burden an already challenging global vaccination of vaccines.
The USC team used artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up vaccine analysis that can be quickly and easily adapted to analyze viral mutations themselves.
Using a machine learning algorithm, the model can reportedly complete the design cycles of vaccines within minutes or even seconds, in a performance that lasted months, if not years, before the pandemic, showing how far humanity has in recent times 12 months have come or so.
“This AI framework, applied to the details of this virus, can provide vaccine candidates within seconds and move quickly to clinical trials to achieve preventative medical therapies without compromising safety,” said Paul Bogdan, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. at USC Viterbi, said. and added that it would enable medical researchers to “stay ahead of the coronavirus as it mutates around the world.”
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The method optimizes possible treatments for the specific strain of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19 very quickly, eliminating about 95 percent of the possible compounds that can be used in vaccines.
Using only one SARS-CoV-2 strain, the system predicted 26 potential vaccines that reduced it to just 11, all of which invade the virus’ proteins that the virus uses to invade human cells and launch itself. repeat.
The AI-powered system can invent new vaccines in less than a minute and validate their quality in less than an hour, in a wonderful and promising breakthrough, of course, once independently verified and thoroughly tested.
The timing could not have been better either, as the medical community is increasingly concerned that new variants and mutations of the virus will be resistant to the current generation of vaccines currently being rolled out around the world.
Furthermore, the current prototype system used only two of a possible 700,000 proteins to develop the vaccine designs, which opened the door to a potentially unbeatable arsenal of candidates for vaccination.
The machine learning algorithm retrieves its intellectuals from a giant bioinformatics database called the Immune Epitope Database (IEDB). An epitope is the part of an antigen – something that triggers an immune response – where an antibody – the immune system’s response to an antigen – can bind.
The database contains 600,000 known epitopes of approximately 3,600 different species, including the genome and vein protein sequence of SARS-CoV-2.
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