DUBAI: Four months into the battle against the latest strain of the coronavirus, it is clear that humanity must deploy all medical and technological tools at its disposal.
Roughly half the global population has been placed on lockdown and billions of dollars are being poured into vaccine research, yet the total number of confirmed cases worldwide has hit the two million mark.
With no sign of an imminent breakthrough, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to speed up the search for an antidote to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19 is a no-brainer.
In fact, scientific institutions and governments have already been harnessing AI to generate possible solutions to the global public-health emergency.
Shameer Thaha, CSO at Accubits, a UAE-based AI and blockchain focused solutions and development company, says AI is playing a key role since day one of the fight against humanity’s common foe.
AI is assisting medical professionals to identity components of a potential coronavirus vaccine by “analyzing viral protein structures” and helping researchers scan through thousands of research papers, according to Thaha.
Recently, Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold was used to predict structures of proteins associated with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
“There are three types of vaccines: Whole-pathogen vaccines, subunit vaccines, and nucleic acid vaccines,” Thaha said, adding that the last is the kind of vaccine needed to target the coronavirus.
“Nucleic acid vaccines inject the genetic material of the pathogen into human cells to stimulate an immune response … and AI is useful in accelerating the development of subunit and nucleic acid vaccines,” Thaha said.
Electronic tracking of individuals is another activity that is benefiting from advances in AI in recent years.