2022 LSU Gumbo - Book - Page 139
A team of LSU scientists and computer science students
helped develop a new treatment that could ease symptoms
and shorten the duration of the COVID-19 virus in people,
especially the vaccinated.
The treatment, known as SM-19, is a product of LSU’s
DeepDrug team that uses artificial intelligence to develop
drugs and test their effectiveness. The team worked in
collaboration with Skymount Medical, a Canadian biotech
company.
The drug, consisting of a combination of anti-cancer
and anti-parasitic drugs, underwent testing at the Illinois
Institute of Technology late last year and was shown to be
97% effective in reducing the viral load and transmission of
COVID-19 in animal cells. The treatment, delivered orally,
also reduces the duration of severe symptoms.
Skymount Medical began human testing of the
treatment on Aug. 11. Human clinical trials are currently
underway in Ukraine and California’s Riverside University
Health System.
“This would be especially useful for people who are
vaccinated who don’t get sick enough to go into the
ICU but could still get pretty sick and need to mitigate
their symptoms,” said Adam Bess, LSU computer science
graduate student and member of the DeepDrug team.
Helping to ease the suffering of those infected
and making life easier for those infected at home is
critical to ending the pandemic, associate professor of
computer science and DeepDrug team leader Supratik
Mukhopadhyay said.
DeepDrug’s artificial intelligence predicts how molecules
combine together and determine what drugs they’ll create,
Mukhopadhyay said. The team’s initial plan was to use the
artificial intelligence to condense the timeline and reduce
the costs of developing antibiotics to work against drugresistant bacteria, known as superbugs.
A typical antibiotic would take almost a decade and
close to $3 billion to develop. DeepDrug could reduce
development time to a month or less at a fraction of the
cost, Mukhopadhyay said.
“Suppose a patient is dying from a drug-resistant
bacteria, you can’t do anything; it will take years to get the
drug. By that time the patient is already dead,” he said. “We
thought if we could bring [the creation of drugs] down to
months or to days it could actually save lives.”
When COVID-19 hit, the DeepDrug team, consisting
of Mukhopadhyay, Bess, PhD student Frej Berglind and
associate professor of biological sciences Michal Brylinski,
shifted its focus to developing treatments for the virus.
“As COVID hit, we thought that we could repurpose
our DeepDrug engine for COVID, to discover drugs for
[the virus],” he said. “So far we have [discovered drugs] for
bacteria and now here is this new beast.”
Mukhopadhyay and Bess were at the world headquarters
of TED giving a talk about the applications of DeepDrug
when the pandemic began. When they arrived back in
Baton Rouge, they began reconfiguring the team’s machines
to repurpose drugs and compounds into viable treatments
for COVID-19, Mukhopadhyay said.
By July, the artificial intelligence housed in Patrick
F. Taylor Hall was ready to research how to “repurpose
existing FDA approved drugs that are today used for other
purposes towards [treating] COVID,” Mukhopadhyay said.
The DeepDrug is producing results that are “more
comprehensive than a lot of the other players in the biotech
start-up space,” Bess said. “We are getting results no one else
has found.”
Skymount has been involved with DeepDrug as
early as 2016 and have “always supported the work of
Dr. Mukhopadhyay,” Chris Galliano, Skymount’s Chief
Technology Officer, said. It wasn’t until the pandemic that
their partnership reached its apex.
“When COVID devastated the state of Louisiana after
Mardi Gras of 2020 we fully committed to expanding
the research of DeepDrug with a sole focus to end the
pandemic,” Galliano said.
Skymount’s role in the collaboration was to provide
funding and manufacturing to the LSU team.
The biotech company provided all of the funds required
to conduct pre-clinical research on over 60 of the drug
candidates that DeepDrug developed, Galliano said.
They also contracted other pharmaceutical companies
to get access to approved drugs as they were needed as trials
began, Bess explained.
DeepDrug has applications beyond COVID-19.
As vaccines and treatments like SV-19 become more
available to the public, DeepDrug will be used to solve
issues neglected by traditional pharmaceutical players,
Mukhopadhyay said. The team currently hopes to work at
developing drugs for cancer, anti-aging and neurobiological
diseases.
By reducing the development time and using generic
drugs to reduce costs, Skymount and DeepDrug are able to
make medicine available to those that would typically be
priced out of life-saving medical treatments, Galliano said.
“The possibilities are endless, but our main focus is to
improve the state of global health and use our talents to
make the world a better place for children to not suffer no
matter their geographic location or economic situation,” he
said. “Poverty and disease should not be synonymous. That
was the old way – we are the new way.”
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