Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can play a major role in the development of new drugs., Avak Kahvejian, the special speaker of the 6th International Medical Congress of Armenia and the main partner of Flagship Pioneering, expressed such a view in an interview with NEWS.am Medicine.

According to him, these technologies can considerably speed up the process of discovering new drugs. If there is digitized data about the human body, its work and some other things, AI can be "educated" on their basis, as the famous ChatGPT chatbot has learned on the basis of information received from many websites. By analyzing a very large amount of data, AI can help find substances that will be effective in the case of a disease.

On the other hand, according to the specialist, such work in biology is much more complicated and will require a greater effort.

As per Kahvejian, the time spent on creating new medicines and vaccines is already getting noticeably shorter. A vivid example is the vaccine against the coronavirus. Two days after sequencing the DNA of this virus, it became possible to create the first sample of the vaccine against it. Of course, it still had to undergo tests, but the discovery of this substance itself was quite quick. Moreover, even the testing process can be accelerated with the help of new technologies; they will help to find out in advance which drugs will be accepted as normal by the patients' organisms and which will not.

Also, the expert noted that AI and machine learning technologies were initially used for finding new drugs against rare diseases. But now their fields of application are expanding; modern technologies are beginning to be used for the treatment of various types of cancer, and in the future they will be used also for very common diseases such as heart diseases.

On the first day of the 6th International Medical Congress of Armenia, Avak Kahvejian delivered a presentation on "Pioneering Programmable Medicines."