Date: December 2, 2020
Place: New Delhi

A group of scientists has developed a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) model that could be very effective in treating cancer by identifying the best drug combinations. These combinations of drugs are expected to selectively kill cancer cells with specific genetic or functional make-up. This new machine learning (ML) method, described in the journal Nature Communications, found associations between drugs and cancer cells that were not observed previously. The model was trained with a large set of data that has been obtained from previous studies, which had investigated the association between drugs and cancer cells.

One of the scientists, Professor Juho Rousu from Aalto University in Finland noted that the model was trained by the machine is a polynomial function familiar from school mathematics, but a very complex one. The researchers also noted that a combination of drug therapy often improves the effectiveness of the treatment that can further reduce the harmful side-effects if the dosage of individual drugs can be reduced. However, experimental screening of drug combination is very slow and expensive, and therefore, it often fails to discover the full benefits of combination theory, the researchers said.