How artificial intelligence can beat childhood cancer

Reasonable hopes that artificial intelligence will be able to develop cures for many forms of cancer give rise to a successful experiment by scientists in Britain.

Research by the Cancer Research Institute (ICR) in London has succeeded in using artificial intelligence to create a new drug treatment for children with a deadly form of cancer that has not improved its survival rate for more than half a century.

As revealed in the Cancer Discovery review, the successful application of the latest technology in the creation and development of targeted therapies for every form of cancer opens new perspectives for the treatment of incurable disease, according to experts.

“The use of artificial intelligence promises to transform the discovery of drugs,” said Christian Helin, executive director at ICR, where a team of medical scientists and data analysts successfully completed the research.

“In this study, the use of artificial intelligence created a new combination of drugs that appears to be promising for the future treatment of some children with incurable brain cancer,” says Professor Helin.

“It is fascinating to think that this may be one of the first examples of treatment suggested by artificial intelligence and will help patients,” he added.

Computer scientists and oncologists at the ICR have used artificial intelligence to find that a combination of two drugs, everolimus and vandetanib, can help cure a rare and rapid form of brain tumor in children called Peripheral Glioma. ).

Today, tumors such as DPG are almost impossible to remove surgically from children because they are diffuse, which means that they do not have specific boundaries to remove them. However, research has shown that everolimus enhances vandetanib’s ability to act and cure this cancer.

The combination has already proven successful in mice and is now being tested in children. Specialists now hope to test it on a much larger number of children in full clinical trials.

The initial experiment showed that the chances of survival of the treated mice increased by 14% compared to those receiving the usual treatment.