AI Cures: data-driven clinical solutions for Covid-19

Modern health care has been reinvigorated by the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence. From speeding image analysis for radiology to advancing precision medicine for personalized care, AI has countless applications, but can it rise to the challenge in the fight against Covid-19? Researchers from the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic), now housed within the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, say the ongoing public health crisis provides ample opportunities for leveraging AI technologies, such as accelerating the search for effective therapeutics and drugs that can treat the disease, and are actively working to translate this potential to success. When Covid-19 began to spread worldwide, Jameel Clinic's community of machine learning and life science researchers redirected their work and began exploring how they can collaborate on the search for solutions by tapping into their collective knowledge and expertise. The ensuing discussions led to the launch of AI Cures, an initiative dedicated to developing machine learning methods for finding promising antiviral molecules for Covid-19 and other emerging pathogens, and to lower the barrier for people from varied backgrounds to get involved by inviting them to contribute to the effort.