Briefs

ICT Results. A robot scientist that can make informed guesses about how effective different chemical compounds will be at fighting different diseases could revolutionise the pharmaceutical industry by developing more effective treatments more cheaply and quickly than current methods.

The robot, known as Eve, uses advanced artificial intelligence combined with innovative data mining and knowledge discovery techniques to analyse the results of pharmacological experiments it conducts itself.

By relating the chemical structure of different compounds to their pharmacological activity, Eve is able to learn which chemical compounds should be tested next, bringing a degree of predictability to drug screening procedures that, until now, have tended to be a bit hit and miss.

"Over time, Eve will learn to pick out the chemical compounds that are likely to be most effective against a certain target by analysing data from past experiments and comparing chemical structures to their pharmacological properties," explains Saso Dzeroski, a researcher at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana who helped develop Eve�s data mining capabilities.

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