Facebook unveils AI model to mix up cancer-curing cocktails with existing drugs

No longer content to simply provide a platform for keeping up with long-lost cousins and spreading conspiracy theories, Facebook has branched out into developing artificial intelligence to help treat complex diseases. The social media giant's AI research department and the Helmholtz Zentrum München, a research center in Germany focused on environmental health, unveiled an open-source AI model designed to determine the viability of repurposing existing drugs into new pharmaceutical cocktails. Researchers and biologists now have free access to the Compositional Perturbation Autoencoder, or CPA, which evaluates the effects of drug combinations in varying dosages--a complicated task, as the number of possibilities can accelerate exponentially into the billions as more medicines are thrown into the mix. The model predicts not only how the drugs interact with one another, but also how they might work together to attack specific cell types and interrupt diseases. The researchers trained the machine learning model on single-cell RNA sequencing data, to help it gauge the effects of drug cocktails on individual cells without requiring drug- or cell-specific programming.