AI steps up in the battle against Coronavirus

We take a look into how artificial intelligence is aiding the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, how effective will AI prove to be? Artificial intelligence may have been hyped - but when it comes to medicine, it already has a proven track record. Oxford-based Exscientia, the first to put an AI-discovered drug into human trial, is trawling through 15,000 drugs held by the Scripps research institute, in California. And Healx, a Cambridge company set up by Viagra co-inventor Dr David Brown, has repurposed its AI system developed to find drugs for rare diseases. Drug discovery has traditionally been slow, but AI is providing much faster results. Healx hopes to turn that information into a list of drug candidates by May and is already in talks with labs to take those predictions into clinical trials.