New Delhi: A team of researchers is using artificial intelligence (AI) to discover existing drugs to help patients suffering from chronic pain.
The Cleveland Clinic team, in a significant collaboration with tech giant IBM, has utilised its deep-learning framework to identify multiple gut microbiome-derived metabolites and FDA-approved drugs. These non-addictive and non-opioid drugs show promise in being repurposed to treat chronic pain, a development that holds great potential for the future of pain management.
Treating chronic pain with opioids is still a challenge due to the risk of severe side effects and dependency, said co-first author Yunguang Qiu, postdoctoral fellow At Cleveland Clinic.
The study, published in the journal Cell Press, focused on mapping gut metabolites to identify drug targets.
They used AI to decode both compound and protein data “to predict which compound has the best chance of influencing our pain receptors in the right way”.
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This would be extremely complex and time-consuming with current computational methods.
Using their deep-learning model LISA-CPI (Ligand Image—and receptor’s three-dimensional (3D) Structures-Aware framework to predict Compound-Protein Interactions), the team predicted how 369 gut microbial metabolites and 2,308 US FDA-approved drugs would interact with 13 pain-associated receptors. This model uses advanced algorithms to analyse complex data and predict potential drug interactions, significantly speeding up the drug discovery process.
Several compounds that could be repurposed to treat pain were identified using the AI framework. If successful, this research could lead to the development of new, non-opioid drugs for chronic pain management, potentially reducing the risk of severe side effects and dependency. Laboratory studies are currently underway to validate these findings.
The team noted that using the algorithm to predict drugs’ potential can lower “the experimental burden researchers must overcome to even come up with a list of candidate drugs for further testing”.
In addition to its use in pain management, the AI tool has the potential to be applied in the discovery of drugs and metabolites for diseases like Alzheimer’s. This versatility of the tool opens up new possibilities in the field of drug discovery, sparking excitement among researchers and healthcare professionals.
The team noted that these foundation models can potentially enhance “AI technologies to rapidly develop therapeutics for multiple challenging human health issues”.
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–IANS
