Robotic drag design is being improved
Eve robot scientist will allow scientists to save time and money
when developing new medicines
DailyTechInfo based on Gizmag materials: "Robot scientist" Eve to save time and money in drug developmentIn the modern world, there are many medicines that have truly miraculous properties, but few people know that the development of such drugs takes years and decades of time, and the costs for this can be astronomical sums.
In order to reduce the time of drug development and shift the economics of this process to a more acceptable side, scientists and engineers from the Universities of Cambridge and Manchester have developed Eve, a "smart" robot scientist who is able to perform research much faster than people, work 24 hours a day and whose operation is much cheaper than maintaining a staff pharmaceutical scientists. And this approach immediately began to give results, during the first "combat" tests, the Eve robot successfully coped with the development of a new drug designed to fight malaria.
According to research conducted by scientists at the University of Cambridge, pharmaceutical research is one of the main "bottlenecks" of modern medicine. Billions of dollars are spent on the creation of new drugs in particularly "tragic" cases, and the process itself can take decades, during which people continue to suffer from diseases. But even if such developments are successful, pharmaceutical companies need to compensate for their costs, which causes the extremely high cost of new most drugs. For this reason, the number of inexpensive drugs against many types of diseases, such as malaria, is very limited, and medicines that can help only a small circle of people are not being developed.
"A lot of tropical diseases are a real scourge for humanity. These diseases affect hundreds of millions of people, of which millions of people die every year," says Professor Steve Oliver from the Center for Systems Biology and the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, "We know what causes many of these diseases, in theory we can effectively resist them using molecular medicines. But the cost, the speed of development of such drugs and the economics of returning investments make them absolutely unattractive for pharmaceutical companies."
The main method used in the development of new drugs is the so-called "brute force" method. This method involves going through all the available options for the composition of the drug and testing them in order to find the most effective option. This method works, but it is extremely time-consuming. Of course, pharmaceutical scientists try to make the most of various automation tools that take over part of the routine work, but no one is immune from mistakes and the likelihood of missing the most effective formulations.
An alternative solution to this problem is the use of specialized robots that are equipped with an artificial intelligence system. Thanks to intelligence, such robots can not only take on their shoulders the performance of routine operations, such robots are able to gain experience by conducting experiments and experiments with all scrupulousness, process and analyze all the collected data and even make changes to existing theories.
The basis of the Eve robot was Adam, a robot scientist developed back in 2009 by scientists from the University of Aberystwyth and Cambridge. This robot automatically conducts procedures for preliminary testing of drug formulations. The robot's design is designed in such a way that it can conduct up to 10 thousand tests per day. At the same time, the robot does not rely on the randomness of the brute force method, it makes random samples from the entire available range of compounds, conducts several identical tests in order to eliminate the probability of error. The formulations that have shown the best results are carefully analyzed, the robot finds out and predicts the effects of each of the types of molecules that make up the drug by statistical analysis and other methods. And based on such data, the robot develops the next new compositions, which, in his opinion, should give even better results.
Having created the Eve robot, scientists tested its effectiveness on the tasks of searching for molecular formulations of drugs designed to combat parasites that spread malaria, Chagas disease and schistosomiasis. The results obtained were compared in terms of the effectiveness of exposure with already known formulations of more than 1,500 drugs. The researchers point out that, despite the existence of a mass of drugs, they always have to develop new alternatives that are aimed at combating parasites that have acquired immunity to existing treatments.
"Despite extensive research, no one has been able to find a new highly effective antimalarial agent that could pass the entire clinical trial program," says Professor Ross King, a scientist from the Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Manchester, "Against this background, the work of the Eve robot is a significant achievement. In addition, it clearly demonstrates the possibilities of a completely new approach to the development of new drugs."
Currently, the Eve robot does not yet have the full ability to design new formulations of medicines based on data obtained during tests of previous formulations. But such a function will be given to the robot in the very near future, and after that, the efficiency of one robot will be able to exceed many times the efficiency of a group of pharmaceutical scientists with a sufficiently numerous composition.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru10.02.2015