How AI is finding drugs to treat coronavirus Sifted

"It still makes the hair stand up at the back of my neck, thinking about it," says Peter Richardson, vice president of pharmacology at BenevolentAI, describing the moment when he realised that baricitinib, a drug previously used for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, could be an effective treatment for Covid-19. The team at BenevolentAI, a UK company that uses machine learning to aid drug discovery, had been searching through their database of all existing, approved drugs, searching for one that could be repurposed to treat the novel coronavirus. The whole process took just three days. "Most drug companies had been looking at antiviral drugs, but we approached it from the other end and looked at what processes used by the virus could be disrupted," says Richardson. Protein kinases -- enzymes that speed up chemical reactions in the body -- seemed a promising area to look into.