Artificial intelligence helps researchers predict drug combinations' side effects

The problem is that with so many drugs currently on the U.S. pharmaceutical market, "it's practically impossible to test a new drug in combination with all other drugs, because just for one drug that would be five thousand new experiments," said Marinka Zitnik, a postdoctoral fellow in computer science. With some new drug combinations, she said, "truly we don't know what will happen." But computer science may be able to help. In a paper presented July 10th at the 2018 meeting of the International Society for Computational Biology in Chicago. Zitnik and colleagues Monica Agrawal, a master's student, and Jure Leskovec, an associate professor of computer science, lay out an artificial intelligence system for predicting, not simply tracking, potential side effects from drug combinations.