Zhavoronkov says his drug is special because AI software not only helped decide what target inside a cell to interact with, but also what the drug's chemical structure should be. Popular forms of AI can draw pictures and answer questions. But there's a growing effort to get AI to dream up cures for awful diseases, too. That may be why Jensen Huang, president of Nvidia, which sells AI chips and servers, claimed in December that "digital biology" is going to be the "next amazing revolution" for AI. "This is going to be flat out one of the biggest ones ever," he said.

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.

Now the company says it has fine-tuned that protein model to predict which misspellings found in human DNA are safe to ignore and which are likely to cause disease. The new software, called AlphaMissense, was described today in a report published by the journal Science. As part of its project, DeepMind says, it is publicly releasing tens of millions of these predictions, but the company isn't letting others directly download the model because of what it characterizes as potential biosecurity risks should the technique be applied to other species. Although not intended to directly make diagnoses, computer predictions are already used by doctors to help locate the genetic causes of mysterious syndromes. In a blog post, DeepMind said its results are part of an effort to uncover "the root cause of disease" and could lead to "faster diagnosis and developing life-saving treatments."

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.

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.

The artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT that has taken the world by storm has made its formal debut in the scientific literature -- racking up at least four authorship credits on published papers and preprints. Journal editors, researchers and publishers are now debating the place of such AI tools in the published literature, and whether it's appropriate to cite the bot as an author. Publishers are racing to create policies for the chatbot, which was released as a free-to-use tool in November by tech company OpenAI in San Francisco, California. AI bot ChatGPT writes smart essays -- should professors worry? ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM), which generates convincing sentences by mimicking the statistical patterns of language in a huge database of text collated from the Internet. The bot is already disrupting sectors including academia: in particular, it is raising questions about the future of university essays and research production.

Hong Kong-based drug discovery and development company Insilico has secured fresh capital at a time that its CEO described as a "biotech winter." The firm has raised $35 million on the heels of its last tranche in June, bringing its total Series D investment to $95 million. The new round was "oversubscribed", the firm's founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov told TechCrunch, declining to disclose the company's valuation. Prosperity7, the venture capital arm of Saudi Arabia's state oil company Aramco, led the new capital infusion. The fund has been actively scouring for opportunities in and around China that can scale globally and particularly in the Middle East.

The AI-powered protein-folding model AlphaFold has predicted more than 200 million proteins, nearly all such structures known to science, DeepMind said on Thursday. Proteins are complex biological molecules produced in living organisms from instructions stored in DNA. Made from as many as 20 types of amino acids, these nano-scale chains perform vital cellular tasks to carry out all sorts of bodily functions. Knowing the three-dimensional form of proteins is important since its physical structure provides hints at how it behaves, and what purpose it serves, which helps us do things like develop drugs, and create copycat proteins for those lacking them. Some proteins are helpful, such as those involved in digesting food while others can be harmful, such as those involved in the growth of tumors. Figuring out their complicated wriggly shapes, however, is difficult.