How AI will disrupt the treatment of Parkinson’s

Christopher Trummer, co-founder and CEO of tech-enabled early-stage drug discovery company CelerisTX. He shares his insights with Health Tech World about how artificial intelligence will “disrupt” how we treat Parkinson’s Disease…

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are already having a major impact on the biopharma space. They are being used to change the ways in which we develop new therapeutics, identify biomarkers, and treat patients. And at this point, the extent of their potential can only be guessed at.

But for diseases that are currently considered incurable, ML and AI have a potentially significant role to play, helping to identify the hidden links between the disease and biological causes, while deriving therapies that will potentially lead to the production of curatives.

“Transformative” for Parkinson’s

And for Parkinson’s and other central nervous system (CNS) diseases, the impact could be transformative.

Pharmaceutical therapeutics & AI

It’s no secret that the path towards pharmaceutical development can be complex and convoluted. To simplify, it can be broken down into four major stages.

Biological target identification – such as a protein within the body that causes a disease – and validation
Compound (molecule) screening and lead discovery
Preclinical development
Clinical development

While the latter stages have already become known to the broader public, especially through the COVID-19 crisis, the first two stages are also co-decisive. Machine learning can now help with all four stages.

Using a wide variety of algorithms, data sources and application areas, it can support both predictive models and generative models to develop new drugs.

How can this translate to Parkinson’s treatment?

Through new predictive models and exploiting data sources, researchers are able to make hidden connections between a disease to a target. This gives us more potential targets to eliminate incurable diseases from multiple levels.[…]