Researchers develop AI tool to combat COVID variants of the future

While considerable advances have been achieved in our battle against the coronavirus, new mutations of COVID19 continue to emerge and could threaten public health. To prevent further severe pandemics, researchers from the University of Copenhagen and the immunotherapy company Evaxion have teamed up to develop a new AI tool that can more quickly and effectively predict how different protein elements can be assembled to increase the likelihood of coronavirus protection. Their tool, BIFROST, is a computer model that uses algorithms to put together virus proteins that are most likely to be included in a vaccine, explains Christian Thygesen, an industrial Ph.D. Thygesen has developed the model together with Evaxion and Associate Professor Thomas Hamelryck in the Deep Probabilistic Programming group at the University of Copenhagen's Department of Computer Science. "For a vaccine to be effective, the body must be able to produce antibodies against viruses. It does so if it recognizes dangerous proteins--such as coronavirus spike proteins. With BIFROST, we use algorithms to prioritize the parts of viral proteins that we already know can stimulate an immune response, so that we can assemble them in a way that is most likely to work in a vaccine," says Christian Thygesen.