Health care
BY KAMERYN GRIESSER
Health Care Edition
2024
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UT researchers use AI to create costly Alzheimer’s drug for less
From chat bots to art production, new uses for arti cial intelligence are blooming left and right. Now, University of Texas researchers have found a way to harness the power of AI to create an expensive Alzheimer’s medication for less. The goal The study, published in March, utilized an AI tool developed by UT post-doctoral researcher Danny Diaz to create the active ingredient in the common Alzheimer’s medication galantamine. Galantamine is typically manufactured using da odils. However, the extraction process is time-consuming and costly due to unpredictable crop yields and weather, Diaz said. Just one prescription of galantamine requires hundreds of da odils and costs around $70-$116, according to health care technology company Oracle Health. Instead of relying on da odils, Diaz said the goal of the study is to eventually use bacteria to produce the active ingredient. “The goal is to turn sugar, which is like food for the bacteria, into a pharmaceutical drug for Alzheimer’s,” said Diaz, who now leads the Deep Proteins group at the Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning. “Eventually, the hope is to
make the drug much more a ordable.” How it works By genetically modifying bacteria, the researchers can essentially “program” the microbes to create the active ingredient in galan- tamine as a byproduct of its normal metabolic function. Diaz said the challenge has been creating the right instruction manual for the bacteria, which involves changing their protein structures. “There are almost in nite combinations [of protein sequences] to try. ... So the AI can narrow that research space down and save time by signi cantly lowering the risk of not nding something that works,” Diaz said. What’s next So far, Diaz said the team is about one-fourth of the way to completing the bacteria’s proper mutation, and he expects the study could wrap up within the next ve years. With 2024 being named UT’s “Year of AI,” the university has become involved in dozens of AI research projects and programs in recent years. Diaz said he believes AI research will have the largest impact in biotechnology and health care.
Other healthcare research from UT Austin has used AI to:
Enhance diagnostic CT Scans for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
Predict and identify patients at risk for developing Type II diabetes
Assess mental health questionnaires for depression symptoms
Diagnose knee arthritis from medical images
SOURCE: UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN COMMUNITY IMPACT
“It’s really hard for humans to wrap their head around a lot of these
problems because they’re just so big and expensive to iterate. ... AI is going to be revolutionary in how we manufacture drugs.” DANNY DIAZ, UT POST DOCTORAL RESEARCHER
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