Artificial Intelligence: The Next Revolution in Healthcare and Precision Medicine

Autoimmune diseases, infectious disease and cancer have become increasingly difficult to treat using conventional methods that do not take into account individual genetic, environmental, and lifestyle differences. Developing new personalized treatments is like trying to work a vast, multidimensional jigsaw puzzle with pieces that are constantly changing shape. The Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory (NIMML), a leading lab at the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech and Biotherapeutics, a biotech startup, are applying artificial intelligence methods to accelerate the path to cures for complex human diseases. These efforts are aligned with the Precision Medicine Initiative which gives researchers and medical practitioners tools to cure people, but it is also empowers individuals to monitor and take a more active role in their own health. Artificial intelligence algorithms are used to create synthetic patient populations with the properties of actual patient cohorts, build personalized predictive models of drug combinations and unravel complex relationships between diet, microbiome and genetic lineup to determine the comparative treatment response.