Print this page
Published in AI

Insilico Medicine AI COVID tool uses Xeons

by on08 September 2020


Intel helps in COVID-19 research

Industry veteran Alex Zhavoronkov who left the PC industry (ATI and AMD) to start the AI longevity focused Insilico Medicine, has announced AI-powered COVIDomic to power the COVID-19 basic and clinical research.

Insilico Medicine is a global leader in artificial intelligence for drug discovery and development, and the company is among the first in the world to embrace AI technologies in tools in drug discoveries. Now the company realized that it could use AI on Intel Xeon architecture to launch a new system for COVID-19 basic and clinical research.

Insilico Medicine came up with COVIDomic, a foundational technology that enables scientists to use anonymized patient data to integrate with a variety of existing data sets. COVIDomic is an essential tool that can enlarge the test group without compromising data, delivering more accurate studies and results.

Bioinformatics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools can then be applied in many ways, starting with better stratifying COVID-19 patients, understanding the disease trajectory, and identifying relevant disease pathways and targets.  COVIDomic is built using massive multi-omics data sets, sophisticated dimensionality reduction algorithms, and deep learning systems. This amount of computing will rely on Intel Xeon processors.

The development team is inviting scientists globally to contribute to the development of the system and engage in active research collaborations.

COVIDomic is a cloud-based platform that uses AI approaches to identify risk factors associated with severe disease progression. A researcher can upload wide combinations of patient data, including viral and human genomes, rich metadata (describing patient’s lifestyle, co-morbid disorders and biological age), results of blood tests and even transcriptomic sequencing of lung fluid or nasal swabs (to identify changes in microbial communities). As a result, the platform identifies the minimum number of relevant features that could be used to define severe disease progression for a given population.

“COVIDomics is an open access tool to stratify risk and severity from multimodal data sets, including multi-omics data. Insilico Medicine’s AI-driven generative biology approach is a unique offering in the marketplace. We are part of many COVID-19 consortiums and collaborations but COVIDomic is a system that will help scientists and researchers alike to predict the severity of the disease”, said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, Founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine. “By predicting outcomes, clinicians can establish protocols and treatments we hope will reduce the severity and mortality of infection.”

“Analyzing massive amounts of data – quickly – across geographies and data sets is essential for gaining insights into how the novel coronavirus affects people across the world”, noted Rick Echevarria, Intel Vice President, Sales, Marketing, and Communications Group. “Intel computing power enables AI that can help researchers in the fight against COVID-19. We hope that by sharing our expertise, resources and technology we can help accelerate research across diverse geographies and with companies such as Insilico Medicine.”

Last modified on 09 September 2020
Rate this item
(4 votes)