Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) impacts 1.6 million people in the U.S. -- and a new artificial intelligence-generated drug could help alleviate symptoms. Insilico Medicine, an AI-driven biotech company based in Hong Kong and in New York City, recently announced that its new AI-designed IBD drug -- ISM5411 -- has entered Phase I clinical trials. This is Insilico's fifth AI-designed drug to enter the pipeline. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)? If approved, it would be the first medication to treat IBD by blocking prolyl hydroxylase domain (PHD), a protein that regulates the body's gut barrier protection genes, according to Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine.

PsychoGenics CEO Emer Leahy of Paramus, New Jersey, explains how the first potential AI-discovered treatment for schizophrenia was developed through machine learning. Fox News Digital spoke with her. Artificial intelligence is increasingly moving into the health care arena and helping to streamline medical processes -- including the creation of new drugs. Insilico Medicine, an AI-driven biotech company based in Hong Kong and in New York City, recently announced that its new AI-designed drug for COVID-19 has entered Phase I clinical trials. This oral drug is a treatment, not a vaccine.

People in Texas sounded off on AI job displacement, with half of people who spoke to Fox News convinced that the tech will rob them of work. The first-ever drug generated by artificial intelligence has entered Phase 2 clinical trials, with the first dose successfully administered to a human, Insilico Medicine announced yesterday. The drug, currently referred to as INS018_055, is being tested to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a rare, progressive type of chronic lung disease. The 12-week trial will include participants diagnosed with IPF. "This drug, which will be given orally, will undergo the same rigorous testing to ensure its effectiveness and safety, like traditionally discovered drugs, but the process of its discovery and design are incredibly new," said Insilico Medicine's CEO Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, in a statement to Fox News Digital.

Thomas Fuchs, the Dean of Artificial Intelligence and Human Health at Mount Sinai in NYC, said AI will be needed to retain the standard of care in the U.S. Glioblastoma is one of the deadliest types of brain cancer, with the average patient living only eight months after diagnosis, according to the National Brain Tumor Society, a nonprofit. Two ambitious high school students -- Andrea Olsen, 18, from Oslo, Norway, and Zachary Harpaz, 16, from Fort Lauderdale, Florida -- are looking to change that. The teens partnered with Insilico Medicine, a Hong Kong-based medical technology company, to identify three new target genes linked to glioblastoma and aging. They used Insilico's artificial intelligence platform, PandaOmics, to make the discovery -- and now, they plan to continue researching ways to fight the disease with new drugs. Their findings about target genes were published on April 26 in Aging, a peer-reviewed biomedical academic journal.

GTC--NVIDIA today announced an expanded set of generative AI cloud services for customizing AI foundation models to accelerate the creation of new proteins and therapeutics, as well as research in the fields of genomics, chemistry, biology and molecular dynamics. Part of NVIDIA AI Foundations, the new BioNeMo Cloud service offering -- for both AI model training and inference -- accelerates the most time-consuming and costly stages of drug discovery. It enables researchers to fine-tune generative AI applications on their own proprietary data, and to run AI model inference directly in a web browser or through new cloud application programming interfaces (APIs) that easily integrate into existing applications. "The transformative power of generative AI holds enormous promise for the life science and pharmaceutical industries," said Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA. "NVIDIA's long collaboration with pioneers in the field has led to the development of BioNeMo Cloud Service, which is already serving as an AI drug discovery laboratory. It provides pretrained models and allows customization of models with proprietary data that serve every stage of the drug-discovery pipeline, helping researchers identify the right target, design molecules and proteins, and predict their interactions in the body to develop the best drug candidate."

Artificial intelligence has developed a treatment for an aggressive form of cancer in just 30 days and demonstrated it can predict a patient's survival rate using doctors' notes. The breakthroughs were performed by separate systems, but show how the powerful technology's uses go far beyond the generation of images and text. University of Toronto researchers worked with Insilico Medicine to develop potential treatment for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) using an AI drug discovery platform called Pharma. HCC is a form of liver cancer, but the AI discovered a previously unknown treatment pathway and designed a'novel hit molecule' that could bind to that target. The system, which can also predict survival rate, is the invention of scientists from the University of British Columbia and B.C. Cancer, who found the model is 80 percent accurate.

Pharmacy visitors expect quick service - to have their prescription filled quickly, or over-the-counter remedy purchased in just a few minutes. In this rapid interaction, little thought goes to the journey of that medicine from a microscope slide to mass production. In reality, the drug discovery process is incredibly time and research-intensive. Despite significant advancements in manufacturing and discovery, the average time to bring a drug from the initial stage to market is 10-15 years and costs millions of dollars. Emerging technologies are transforming healthcare and drug discovery.

In 2020 I joined the private beta test of Open AI's Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), which is an earlier version of ChatGPT. When ChatGPT was released in November 2022, I started experimenting with it. Large language models like ChatGPT are expected to enable a new wave of research, creativity and productivity, because they can help generate solutions for complex problems. For over two years I've been exploring the strengths and limits of this technology and assessing how this tool could be useful to me. I'm also interested how this new technology is being utilized by scientists to make meaningful contributions to academic work.

New research uses AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered protein structure database, to accelerate the design and synthesis of a drug to treat hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common type of primary liver cancer. It is the first successful application of AlphaFold to hit identification process in drug discovery. This study by an international team of researchers, published last week in Chemical Science, is led by the University of Toronto's Acceleration Consortium director Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Chemistry Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, and Insilico Medicine founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov. AI is revolutionizing drug discovery and development. In 2022, the AlphaFold computer program, developed by Alphabet's DeepMind, predicted protein structures for the whole human genome––a remarkable breakthrough in both AI applications and structural biology.

This week Insilico Medicine announced the launch of Life Star - their AI powered 6th generation robotics lab for drug discovery. This state of the art lab is equipped with several types of autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) and advanced imaging devices. The AGV robots are driven by AI and guided by radar. The robots - which are completely controlled by AI - connect all of the automation modules in the lab. Insilico's lab is different from every other lab because Life Star is a 6th generation lab, meaning it does not require any human intervention.