Robot Scientist Discovers Potential Malaria Drug

While drug companies struggle to develop medicines for rich countries and typically overlook diseases elsewhere, a robot scientist named Eve has found compounds that could fight drug-resistant malaria. Eve's developers believe their artificial intelligence (AI) technology could speed up drug discovery, as critics call for a "match" with a live chemist. The AI-endowed robot is designed to add a new, advanced ability to learn on top of the computational smarts that the pharmaceutical industry already uses. In research published February 4 in Journal of the Royal Society Interface computer scientist Ross King from the University of Manchester in England and his team say Eve found a chemical called TNP-470 effectively targets an enzyme that is key to the growth of Plasmodium vivax, one of the parasites that causes malaria. "I didn't expect to actually find any useful compounds, I thought we'd just demonstrate the AI," King says.