Computers vs. Corona: How AIs are contributing to the fight against Covid-19

3/6/2020
In the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak, there has been a growing push to develop drugs that can
combat the increasing number of infections. However, the process of developing a new drug that
can be taken into clinical trials is arduous, lasting at least a year, if not longer. With a pandemic such
as the coronavirus, however, time is of the essence - even a few weeks can spell the difference
between a few hundred and a few thousand new cases. Towards this end, biotech companies have turned to using AI, hoping to leverage machine learning
techniques to identify and develop new drugs. Insilico Medicine Inc., a Hong Kong based company,
has already identified and begun development on 7 new drugs that could fight the coronavirus through
use of its AI networks. Another company, Vir Biotechnology Inc., is using AI to predict how changes in
chemical structure of new drugs could affect their potency in the body. It isn’t all good news, however - combating novel diseases like Covid-19 is often an issue of putting out
multiple different fires rather than one big fire. Due to how frequently these diseases mutate, it is
essential that any new treatments have broad applications across a wide variety of different strains,
lest they risk becoming ineffective against newer strains. This article reflects an obvious opportunity that has arisen from the development of technology and the
benefit it can have for society as a whole. Biotech isn’t the only area where AI can play an essential
role - the computational power of current generation AI networks in creating and running predictive
models alone is useful for economics, finance, logistics, and so on. In a matter of two decades,
technology has advanced by leaps and bounds - like it or not, companies will have to understand and
take advantage of the opportunities that developments in areas like AI present, lest they fall into
obsolescence. https://www.wsj.com/articles/biotech-companies-tap-ai-to-speed-path-to-coronavirus-treatments-
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