Powerful algorithms used by Netflix, Amazon and Facebook can ‘predict’ the biological language of neurodegenerative diseases, scientists have found.
Big data produced during decades of research was fed into a computer language model to see if artificial intelligence (AI) can make more advanced discoveries than humans.
Academics from St John’s College, University of Cambridge, found the machine-learning technology could decipher the ‘biological language’ of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s.
Their groundbreaking study could be used in the future to ‘correct the grammatical mistakes inside cells that cause disease’.
“Bringing machine-learning technology into research into neurodegenerative diseases and cancer is an absolute game-changer,” says Professor Tuomas Knowles, lead author of the paper and a Fellow at St John’s College.
“Ultimately, the aim will be to use artificial intelligence to develop targeted drugs to dramatically ease symptoms or to prevent dementia happening at all.”
Every time Netflix recommends a series to watch or Facebook suggests someone to befriend, the platforms are using machine-learning algorithms to make highly educated guesses about what people will do next.
Voice assistants like Alexa and Siri can even recognise individual people and instantly ‘talk’ back to you.
Dr Kadi Liis Saar, first author of the paper and a Research Fellow at St John’s College, used similar machine-learning technology to train a large-scale language model to look at what happens when something goes wrong with proteins inside the body to cause disease.
“The human body is home to thousands and thousands of proteins and scientists don’t yet know the function of many of them,” she says.
“We asked a neural network based language model to learn the language of proteins.
“We specifically asked the program to learn the language of shapeshifting biomolecular condensates – droplets of proteins found in cells – that scientists really need to understand to crack the language of biological function and malfunction that cause cancer and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.
“We found it could learn, without being explicitly told, what scientists have already discovered about the language of proteins over decades of research.”
Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases are three of the most common neurodegenerative diseases, but scientists believe there are several hundred.
The machine-learning technology is developing at a rapid pace due to the growing availability of data, increased computing power, and technical advances which have created more powerful algorithms.
Further use of machine-learning could transform future cancer and neurodegenerative disease research.
Discoveries could be made beyond what scientists currently already know and speculate about diseases and potentially even beyond what the human brain can understand without the help of machine-learning.
“Machine-learning can be free of the limitations of what researchers think are the targets for scientific exploration and it will mean new connections will be found that we have not even conceived of yet. It is really very exciting indeed,” says Dr Saar.
