🦠 AI Will Predict a New Pandemic
Over the next decade, according to some forecasts, there's a one in four chance of another outbreak on the scale of Covid-19. Researchers from different countries are actively testing the potential of artificial intelligence to ensure that a new pandemic does not take humanity by surprise.
🦠 Scientists from Harvard Medical School and Oxford University have developed EVEScape, an AI-powered tool that makes predictions about new variants of coronavirus.
Scientists trained the model on detailed biological and structural information about SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses, including HIV and influenza. This allows it to predict their evolution and mutations reliably.
Experts are already using EVEscape in real time to assess the danger of new COVID viruses. Based on AI calculations, they publish a ranking of new SARS-CoV-2 variants twice a month and pass this information to the WHO. The accuracy of the model's predictions exceeds 85%.
✅ Developers have tested the tool using only the data available in February 2020 — at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. EVEscape successfully predicted which virus mutations would emerge and become most prevalent and which therapies would lose efficacy.
The model is freely available to developers.
One of the unique strengths of our approach is that it can be used early in a pandemic. It could be good for vaccine manufacturers, and also for people trying to identify therapeutics, particularly antibodies to get some insight early on into which mutations might arise even a year in the future.
Nikki Thadani, EVEScape developer
🔜 Researchers from two California universities are developing another AI-based early warning system to help predict future pandemics. It uses a database of 2.3 billion health-related US Twitter posts since 2015. The algorithm trains to identify meaningful tweets to help detect early signs of upcoming virus outbreaks and evaluate the potential outcomes of specific public health policies.
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