New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) began studying their new project by collaborating with Google to develop an AI-based machine to diagnose critical illnesses.
Scientists involved in the project are working on a new artificial intelligence technology so that they can profile thousands of patients and see the unknown effects and thus be able to produce medicine.
Many drug attempts for diseases that are difficult to treat, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, fail. According to the information shared as a result of the joint work of Google Research and the New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute, there are some reasons why it is difficult to understand this disease and determine a treatment.
NYSCF CEO Susan L. Solomon, JD stated:
Traditional drug discovery isn’t working very well, particularly for complex diseases like Parkinson’s. The robotic technology NYSCF has built allows us to generate vast amounts of data from large populations of patients and discover new signatures of disease as an entirely new basis for discovering drugs that work.
The new robotic technology will help them examine patients’ cells without directly working on their bodies to produce drugs that will help with their recovery.
Solomon continued to explain:
Part of why so many drugs fail is because drug developers have had to rely on mouse models whose biology is just completely different from human patients, as well as preconceived notions about what is driving the disease, which typically has ended up being wrong or does not hold true for every patient.
AI treatment for diseases
Normally, experts falsify a condition, like a disease they want to work on, in a mouse and put the drugs in the mouse’s body to watch the effects on it. But due to mouses having different cells and body systems, unless a human’s body gets these drugs, they can not be sure about it.
Solomon said that they have built robotic technology that allows them “to study human cells from the patients themselves from large populations that generate vast amounts of human data.”
“This allows us to more accurately study features of PD at the level of cells and discover treatments that actually work across different patients or even groups of patients,” he concluded.
Credit: Samwan Rob, The New York Stem Cell Foundation
Researchers attribute the success of the study to the ‘team science’ approach.
This study was a massive collaboration between many teams: the disease researchers, data scientists (such as myself), and engineers at NYSCF along with computer scientists and engineers at Google. –Bianca Migliori, Ph.D., Senior Staff Data Scientist at NYSCF.
“It was really exciting to see what is possible when such talented people combine forces,” Migliori said.
Recognition technology
This system, created with the power of artificial intelligence, has similar features to face recognition technology. The algorithm, which examines different cells that are healthy and disease-carrying, can detect the disease.
As a result of the process, the system can now recognize diseased cells. Thanks to this feature of the objective working system, it does not make any prejudices, it is much easier and inevitable to make new discoveries about the disease.
The aforementioned system, which was created with artificial intelligence and robotic technology, and emerged as a result of the collaboration of doctors, researchers, and engineers, is a very valuable study as it will provide new information on diseases and assist in developing new treatments.
