IBM develops AI-powered technologies to accelerate COVID-19 drug discovery

08 / 04 / 2020

By Marwa Nassar - -

IBM Research has been actively developing new cloud and AI-powered technologies that can help healthcare researchers, doctors and scientists around the world accelerate coronavirus (COVID-19) drug discovery; from gathering insights, to applying the latest virus genomic information and identifying potential targets for treatments, to creating new drug molecule candidates.

Though some of the resources are still in exploratory stages, IBM is making them available to qualifying researchers at no charge to aid the international scientific investigation of COVID-19.

The announcement follows IBM’s recent leadership in launching the US COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which is harnessing massive computing power in the effort to help confront the coronavirus.

Streamlining the Search for Information

Healthcare agencies and governments around the world have quickly amassed medical and other relevant data about the pandemic. And, there are already vast troves of medical research that could prove relevant to COVID-19. Yet, as with any large volume of disparate data sources, it is difficult to efficiently aggregate and analyze that data in ways that can yield scientific insights.

To help researchers access structured and unstructured data quickly, IBM is offering a cloud-based AI research resource that has been trained on a corpus of thousands of scientific papers contained in the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), prepared by the White House and a coalition of research groups, and licensed databases from the DrugBank, Clinicaltrials.gov and GenBank.

This tool uses IBM’s advanced AI and allows researchers to pose specific queries to the collections of papers and to extract critical COVID-19 knowledge quickly.

IBM has applied this AI technology against three COVID-19 targets to identify 3,000 new small molecules as potential COVID-19 therapeutic candidates. IBM is releasing these molecules under an open license, and researchers can study them via a new interactive molecular explorer tool to understand their characteristics and relationship to COVID-19 and identify candidates that might have desirable properties to be further pursued in drug development.

To streamline efforts to identify new treatments for COVID-19, IBM is also making the IBM Functional Genomics Platform available for free for the duration of the pandemic.

The scientific community is working hard to make important new discoveries relevant to the treatment of COVID-19, and IBM is hopeful that releasing these novel tools will help accelerate this global effort.