Dean Ho, director of the National University of Singapore's Institute for Digital Medicine, used AI and testing on the live virus to derive an optimal combination of drugs and dosages to treat Covid-19
A team of Singapore researchers have identified a new combination of drugs that can be used to treat Covid-19 patients, showing promising results in its efficacy against both the Beta and Delta variants of Covid-19.
The team, led by Dean Ho, the director of Institute for Digital Medicine—a health optimisation institute within the National University of Singapore—used an artificial intelligence platform called IDentif.AI to identify the optimal therapy.
The platform was set up and first put to use in April 2020, when it identified a combination of three drugs to treat the Sars-CoV-2 virus: lopinavir and ritonavir, which are used to treat HIV patients, and remdesivir, an antiviral drug originally developed to treat ebola.
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The drugs were effective, but were not readily available or easily administered—remdesivir, for example, can only be taken through an IV drip. The team’s most recent experiments focused on readily available drugs that could be taken orally.
After testing a range of 12 antivirals and cancer medications, one of the resulting combinations was antiviral drug molnupiravir together with baricitinib, an anti-inflammatory drug.
Ho says that while there isn’t yet data from clinical trials to prove that the drug combination is effective in all phases of the disease, the combination inhibits the virus in laboratory tests, making it suitable for further clinical evaluation. Molnupiravir, which is being trialed by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, recently reported promising results from human trials.
We talk to Ho about the implications of the discovery, and how he used AI to find optimised regimens out of millions of possible drug combinations with precision—all in a three-week timeframe.