Behind Covid-19 vaccine development

When starting a vaccine program, scientists generally have anecdotal understanding of the disease they're aiming to target. When Covid-19 surfaced over a year ago, there were so many unknowns about the fast-moving virus that scientists had to act quickly and rely on new methods and techniques just to even begin understanding the basics of the disease. Scientists at Janssen Research & Development, developers of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine, leveraged real-world data and, working with MIT researchers, applied artificial intelligence and machine learning to help guide the company's research efforts into a potential vaccine. "Data science and machine learning can be used to augment scientific understanding of a disease," says Najat Khan, chief data science officer and global head of strategy and operations for Janssen Research & Development. "For Covid-19, these tools became even more important because our knowledge was rather limited. There was no hypothesis at the time. We were developing an unbiased understanding of the disease based on real-world data using sophisticated AI/ML algorithms."