The artificial intelligence system and the robot connected to it made the first major scientific discovery - they managed to find a new medicine for malaria in ordinary toothpaste, according to an article published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“Our 'colleague' robot Eva has revealed the secret of how triclosan suppresses the development of Plasmodium malaria. This gives us hope that in the near future we will be able to create new drugs that can fight malaria that is resistant to the action of existing drugs. We know that triclosan is safe for humans, and that it acts on the parasite in two different ways, which will prevent the Plasmodium from quickly becoming invulnerable to its action,”says Elizabeth Bilsland of the University of Campinas, Brazil.
In recent years, physicists and mathematicians have begun to actively engage in the development of drugs and various biological molecules, using the latest developments in their field of science to create computer systems capable of conducting thousands of experiments simultaneously and automatically selecting those combinations of drugs and other substances that act on microbes or cells. body in the "right" way.
Now scientists are actively thinking about introducing various kinds of artificial intelligence systems and machine learning methods into the work of such programs, which will allow robots to independently search and improve methods of combating microbes, cancer or viruses. For example, scientists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the Russian-American medical startup Insilico Medicine created an AI system two years ago that could develop cancer drugs.
Billsland and her colleagues have used a similar approach to discover a new cure for malaria, trying to understand why its pathogen, Plasmodium malaria, interacts with triclosan, an antibiotic found in common "medicinal" toothpaste.
This antibiotic, as biologists explain, inhibits the growth of bacteria by interfering with the work of one of their key enzymes, which is responsible for the assembly of fatty molecules necessary for the normal functioning of the cell walls of microbes.
A little more than 10 years ago, scientists discovered that in some cases triclosan can also kill malaria pathogens, but the mechanism of its action on them remained a mystery - the removal of the gene that this antibiotic acts on did not affect the life of plasmodia and did not prevent them from spreading throughout the body. animals. Moreover, all attempts to change the structure of triclosan and increase its activity have failed - new versions of this substance fought malaria no better than the original, or even worse, which made biologists abandon this idea.
The riddle of the antibiotic's unusual behavior was solved by "Eva" - an automated system for conducting experiments, the work of which was controlled by artificial intelligence. She helped scientists create several thousand new strains of yeast, in which DNA was transplanted one of the vital genes of Plasmodium, and to test how such a procedure affected the likelihood of survival of fungi when in contact with triclosan.
Promotional video:
As it turned out, triclosan suppressed the development of malaria by interfering with the work of a completely different enzyme, DHFR, which is responsible for assembling molecules of some amino acids and parts of future DNA “building blocks”. Several other already known anti-malaria drugs act on the same enzyme, but triclosan, in contrast, hardly interacts with the human version of DHFR and does not cause serious side effects.
Scientists hope that their discovery will create new drugs to combat malaria in Africa and Asia, where in recent years new strains of Plasmodium have begun to spread, almost completely invulnerable to the action of classic drugs for this disease, created in the early and middle of the 20th century.