AI helps scientists gain insight into cancer biophysics


New York, Jan 29 (IANS): A team of scientists has used artificial intelligence (AI) to gain insight into the biophysics of cancer with their machine-learning platform predicting a trio of reagents that generated a cancer-like phenotype in tadpoles.

The research, reported in journal Scientific Reports, showed that during these extensive experiments, the biologists observed that all the melanocytes -- a mature melanin-forming cell -- in a single frog larva either converted to the cancer-like form or remained completely normal.

In their study, the researchers asked their AI-derived model to answer the question of how to achieve partial melanocyte conversion within the same animal using one or more interventions.

"We wanted to see if we could break the concordance among cells, which would help us understand how cells make group decisions and determine complex body-wide outcomes," said Tufts University's Michael Levin, who is the paper's corresponding author.

The AI model ultimately predicted that a precise combination of three reagents -- altanserin, a 5HTR2 inhibitor; reserpine, a VMAT inhibitor, and VP16-XlCreb1, mRNA encoding constitutively active CREB -- would achieve that outcome.

The team used the AI-discovered model to run 576 virtual experiments. The last try gave one precise combination of three drugs predicting partial melanocyte conversion.

"Our system predicted a three-component treatment, which we had never have come up with on our own, that achieved the exact outcome we wanted, and which we had not seen before in years of diverse experiments," Levin added.

"Such approaches are a key step for regenerative medicine, where a major obstacle is the fact that it is usually very hard to know how to manipulate the complex networks discovered by bioinformatics and wet lab experiments in such a way as to reach a desired therapeutic outcome," Levin noted.

He said that the team now wanted to do something different -- cure a disease, control cell behaviour and regenerate tissue.

  

Top Stories


Leave a Comment

Title: AI helps scientists gain insight into cancer biophysics



You have 2000 characters left.

Disclaimer:

Please write your correct name and email address. Kindly do not post any personal, abusive, defamatory, infringing, obscene, indecent, discriminatory or unlawful or similar comments. Daijiworld.com will not be responsible for any defamatory message posted under this article.

Please note that sending false messages to insult, defame, intimidate, mislead or deceive people or to intentionally cause public disorder is punishable under law. It is obligatory on Daijiworld to provide the IP address and other details of senders of such comments, to the authority concerned upon request.

Hence, sending offensive comments using daijiworld will be purely at your own risk, and in no way will Daijiworld.com be held responsible.