IBM today announced the launch of services intended to furnish researchers with resources to fight the novel coronavirus. The company made molecules identified by AI as therapeutic candidates available under an open license, and it introduced a free version of its Functional Genomics Platform to support genome features discovery. Additionally, it provided free access to over 1,000 pieces of evidence-based curated COVID-19 and infectious disease content, and it rolled out an AI search engine trained on the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset to allow researchers to quickly find answers to questions. According to Dario Gil, director of IBM Research, IBM created a new AI-generative framework that can rapidly create novel peptides, proteins, drug candidates, and materials, which it applied against three targets to create 3,000 new small molecules as potential COVID-19 therapeutic candidates. Researchers can study them via an interactive tool to understand their characteristics and relationship to COVID-19, and to identify molecules that might have desirable properties to be pursued in drug development.

As the deadly 2019-nCov coronavirus spreads, raising fears of a worldwide pandemic, researchers and startups are using artificial intelligence and other technologies to predict where the virus might appear next -- and even potentially sound the alarm before other new, potentially threatening viruses become public health crises. "What we're doing currently with Coronavirus is really trying to get an understanding of what's happening on the ground through as many sources as we can get our hands on," says John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School. After SARS killed 774 people around the world in the mid-2000s, his team built a tool called Healthmap, which scrapes information about new outbreaks from online news reports, chatrooms and more. Healthmap then organizes that previously disparate data, generating visualizations that show how and where communicable diseases like the coronavirus are spreading. Healthmap's output supplements more traditional data-gathering techniques used by organizations like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO).