How AI and machine learning are helping to tackle COVID-19

Machine learning can also help accelerate the discovery of drugs to help treat COVID-19. BenevolentAI, a UK AI company and AWS customer, turned its platform toward understanding the body's response to the coronavirus. They launched an investigation using their AI drug discovery platform to identify approved drugs which could potentially inhibit the progression of the novel coronavirus. They used machine learning to help derive contextual relationships between genes, diseases and drugs, leading to the proposal of a small number of drug compounds. In just days, BenevolentAI found that Baricitinib (a drug currently approved for rheumatoid arthritis, owned by Eli Lilly) proved the strongest candidate.