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COVID-19 could accelerate AI adoption in healthcare  

In the 1800s the average life expectancy was 36.¹ Thanks to modern medicine, most people nowadays live into old age. Progress, however, hasn’t stopped. If anything, it’s set to accelerate with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI).

What’s interesting is that this Coronavirus may prove to be an important testing ground for AI. It’s still too early in its infancy to defeat COVID-19 outright. However, the novel virus has raised awareness over how AI could transform modern medicine in the future.

How AI could help 

These days, huge amounts of data are collected in medicine. AI can work to establish which antiviral drugs have the potential to bind and block a prominent protein on the outside of a virus. These are what viruses use to enter human cells and replicate. AI could also use genetic data to generate tens of thousands of novel molecules virtually, which could be used to treat COVID-19.

It could also look at drugs used for other unrelated ailments, like rheumatoid arthritis, as potential treatments. Plus, it has the potential to transform clinical development and applications of AI could lead to faster, safer and significantly less expensive clinical trials.²

All of these applications are significant and if we had this technology today it could have been one of the tools used to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.

For now, we are not quite there yet, but there are some novel ways in which AI is being used to detect and tackle this virus.

Detection

Just after midnight on 30 December 2019, Toronto-based start-up BlueDot picked up on a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases centred around a meat market in Wuhan.³ It did so just hours before the first cases of the new Coronavirus were diagnosed. That very same day, it sent a report out to its clients about these findings.

The company uses AI-powered algorithms to analyse statements from official public health organisations, social media, traditional media, global airline ticketing data, livestock health reports and population demographics.

It’s worth noting, however, that it didn’t find COVID-19. The information in the report it provided, allowed human intelligence to interpret and see the threat of this new disease.

Nonetheless, it demonstrated to the world that AI could, in the future, help contain a virus early on before it can spread.

Diagnosis

Another interesting application of AI is diagnosis. Right now, a team of doctors at the Zhongnan Hospital are using GPUaccelerated AI software to detect visual signs of the virus.⁴ These GPU processors are able to carry out multiple computations at once and are typically used to power highend video games. It’s this speed that has also made them popular with AI, as GPUs can carry out the parallel computations that AI needs.

Beijing-based Infervision has developed the software that doctors are using to identify the typical indications of the virus infection by looking for signs of pneumonia. They use NVIDIA V100 GPUs to carry out this task by analysing thousands of CT scans. Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, this same technology was actually being used to detect lung cancer. If it can successfully detect the virus, it could radically alter the way we treat other respiratory illnesses in the future. 

Finding a vaccine

Genome sequencing is important for vaccine development. It can identify genetic patterns related to the virulence of a disease, plus the genetic factors that contribute to immunity or a successful vaccine response.

The cost of sequencing a genome has fallen considerably over the past decade from $10 million to just $1,000 thanks to technological progress.⁵ The speed at which it can be done these days is also part of this story. There are already many biotech and pharmaceutical companies investing heavily in developing this technology.

Interestingly, since the outbreak of COVID-19, big tech companies are now entering the market and could positively disrupt it further.

China’s big technology companies, Baidu and Alibaba for instance, offered their tools and applications to tackle the virus early on during the outbreak. Alibaba has offered its genome sequencing AI for free to the scientific community.⁶ Baidu meanwhile, has joined in, offering its LinearFold algorithms to also help with gene sequencing.

These technologies have already helped prove their worth. They have reduced the time to study the virus’ RNA secondary structure from 55 minutes to just 27 seconds.

AI could prove to be a positive disruptive force in healthcare

 COVID-19 could serve to accelerate the use of AI in modern medicine. There are many future applications where AI is set to prove its worth.

Right now, drugs are designed to treat the mass population, leaving some patients with serious side effects. Personalised medicine would potentially eliminate these side effects and could be even more targeted at treating a particular patient, based upon their genetics.

Such medicines would have been prohibitively too expensive to develop in the past. However, the cost reductions in genetic sequencing achieved by AI has made this a more viable option.

Another application is gene therapy, which could be used to treat diseases such as cancer. Gene therapy is a technique where viral vectors are used to insert new genetic material into a patient’s cells to directly target the source of a disease.

AI has already been used to speed up and reduce the cost of genome sequencing, which has help make gene therapy a more viable treatment. It could also help enhance the gene editing process and develop algorithms that can understand complex diseases more easily for gene therapy.

Overall, AI could one day make both personalised medicine and gene therapy the norm in medicine. If it does, this would radically change the healthcare industry.

While COVID-19 may reframe the way we think about AI and medicine in the future, we believe that Artificial Intelligence has the greater potential to disrupt and transform every industry, increasing growth rates through improvements in productivity, quality, efficacy and time saving. As AI continues to develop rapidly there is the potential to reap benefits for the individual, society and the economy.

As AI foundational technology is being used by more companies every day, we believe the impact will be profound.

Allianz Global Artificial Intelligence    Allianz Global Artificial Intelligence provides investors with access to the long-term potential of the rapidly growing artificial intelligence market through investment in companies that are exposed or connected to the evolution of artificial intelligence. The fund was one of the first AI funds launched that aims to reap the benefits of this fast-growing market and actively invests, across all sectors, all market caps and around the globe, in innovative companies developing or leveraging AI technology. The team is based in San Francisco which is just a doorstep away from the Silicon Valley, and which is clearly one of the most prominent hotspots of the global AI technology industry. The portfolio management team has decades of experience covering the technology sector and strong relationships across the valley. We believe deep bottom-up, fundamental analysis is key to understanding the companies best positioned to benefit from this disruptive technology. The team itself sees almost 1000 companies per annum and is additionally supported by our global resource team covering all other regions and markets which are of interest. This approach provides an invaluable source of information on the key differences between competing companies. With a deeper understanding of a given company’s fundamental outlook, we are in a better position to assess the value of the stock as AI adoption proliferates over the coming years.

 

If you wish to learn more about Allianz Global Artificial Intelligence please visit our dedicated fund page

 

 

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¹ BestMedicalDegrees.com. 2020. The Evolution Of Medicine - Bestmedicaldegrees.Com. [online] Available at: <https://www.bestmedicaldegrees. com/evolution/> [Accessed 22 March 2020].
² https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/life-sciences/artificial-intelligence-in-clinical-trials.html [Accessed 30 March 2020].
³ Stieg, C., 2020. How This Canadian Start-Up Spotted Coronavirus Before Everyone Else Knew About It. [online] CNBC. Available at: <https://www. cnbc.com/2020/03/03/bluedot-used-artificial-intelligence-to-predict-coronavirus-spread.html> [Accessed 22 March 2020].
⁴ News.developer.nvidia.com. 2020. AI Helps Doctors Diagnose The Coronavirus – NVIDIA Developer News Center. [online] Available at: <https://news.developer.nvidia.com/ai-helps-doctors-diagnose-the-coronavirus/> [Accessed 22 March 2020].
⁵ En.wikipedia.org. 2020. $1,000 Genome. [online] Available at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1,000_genome> [Accessed 22 March 2020].
⁶ South China Morning Post. 2020. Alibaba And Baidu Offer AI Gene Sequencing Tools To Help Fight The China Coronavirus Outbreak. [online] Available at: <https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3048317/alibaba-and-baidu-offer-ai-gene-sequencing-tools-help-fight-china>[Accessed 22 March 2020].

 

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