Insilico Medicine, a company that specialises in the development of artificial intelligence for drug discovery and development, announced the launch of a new system for COVID-19 basic and clinical research. The technology enables scientists to use anonymised patient data to integrate with a variety of existing data sets. Bioinformatics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools can then be applied in many ways, starting with better stratifying COVID-19 patients, understanding the disease trajectory and identifying relevant disease pathways and targets.
COVIDomic is a cloud-based platform that uses AI approaches to identify risk factors associated with severe disease progression. A researcher can upload wide combinations of patient data, including viral and human genomes, rich metadata (describing patient’s lifestyle, co-morbid disorders and biological age), results of blood tests and even transcriptomic sequencing of lung fluid or nasal swabs (to identify changes in microbial communities). As a result, the platform identifies the minimum number of relevant features that could be used to define severe disease progression for a given population.
Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, Founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine states: ‘COVIDomics is an open-access tool to stratify risk and severity from multimodal data sets, including multi-omics data. Insilico Medicine’s AI-driven generative biology approach is a unique offering in the marketplace. We are part of many COVID-19 consortiums and collaborations but COVIDomic is a system that will help scientists and researchers alike to predict the severity of the disease. “By predicting outcomes, clinicians can establish protocols and treatments we hope will reduce the severity and mortality of infection.’
COVIDomic is built using massive multi-omics data sets, dimensionality reduction algorithms and deep learning systems. The development team is inviting scientists globally to contribute to the development of the system and engage in active research collaborations.
Rick Echevarria, Intel vice president, sales, marketing, and communications group said: ‘Analyzing massive amounts of data – quickly – across geographies and data sets is essential for gaining insights into how the novel coronavirus affects people across the world. Intel computing power enables AI that can help researchers in the fight against COVID-19. We hope that by sharing our expertise, resources and technology we can help accelerate research across diverse geographies and with companies such as Insilico Medicine.’
