Machine learning models for drug discovery

IBM today announced that its scientists have been granted a patent on machine learning models to predict therapeutic indications and side effects from various drug information sources. IBM Research has implemented a cognitive association engine to identify significant linkages between predicted therapeutic indications and side effects, and a visual analytics system to support the interactive exploration of these associations. This approach could help researchers in pharmaceutical companies to generate hypotheses for drug discovery. For instance, strongly correlated disease-side-effect pairs identified by the patented invention could be beneficial for drug discovery in many ways. One could use the side-effect information to repurpose existing treatments (e.g.