AI如何让老药新用?(4)

GNS has raised a total of $38 million over the years- from Amgen Ventures, the venture capital arm of the drug giant, along with Celgene and a variety of other investors-

to build and fine-tune its models of disease. And in a recent series of trials, first published in 2017 in the medical journal The Lancet, GNS has detailed REFS's potential when applied to a disease such as Parkinson's-

an ailment in which pleiotropic factors render existing treatments wildly hit-or-miss in their effectiveness. With Parkinson's, the network of interactions set in motion by defective genes has a particular shape to it,

and the breakdown of motor functioning is the most reliable indication of its progression. Feeding the genetic data of Parkinson's sufferers and a control group into REFS

helped GNS generate over 100 computer models depicting what might be going on as motor function deteriorates. The models can uncover previously unknown genetic mutations that may contribute to the speedup of deterioration.

But that's just the first part. GNS has used those findings to create 5,000 different computer simulations of randomized control trials, each aiming to predict how fast the disease would progress with varying approaches to treatment.

Such speed--testing can be vastly more economical than seeking the same result through controlled human trials. And GNS, in partnership with other drugmakers, is now applying similar approaches to treatments for diabetes,

ALS, multiple myeloma, and breast cancer, among other diseases. "We now have the ability to create and construct, on the computer, representations of human patients and their diseases

such that we can now probe, drug by drug, care management intervention by care management intervention, and say what treatments work for which patient," says Colin Hill, CEO of GNS.

The simulation, in other words, is not just finding correlations: It is answering What if questions. What if we had given drug A instead of drug B to patient X?