Indonesia Research Agency Uses AI to Invent New Drug

TheIndonesia.co - The National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) developed an application based on artificial intelligence by using machine learning to find candidate drug compounds, especially antivirals.

"Development of this machine learning application is aimed at the discovery of candidate drug compounds, antivirals," said the Acting Head of the BRIN Research Organization for the Assessment and Application of Technology (OR PPT) Dadan M Nurjaman, in a virtual event for the 2021 Health and Food Research and Innovation Title in Jakarta, Tuesday, November 30, 2021.

Dadan said the application is very important in obtaining drug candidates for handling COVID-19 and other diseases. By utilizing artificial intelligence technology, the efficiency of the microbial identification process and the discovery of drug candidate compounds from microbes can be improved, so drug candidates can be found more quickly.

For the development of machine learning, OR PPT created a dataset of known anti-COVID-19 active compounds. The data is used as training data for making machine learning in predicting anti-COVID-19 compounds.

In addition, OR PPT will build a morphological database of microbes and compounds produced by microbes as a dataset for artificial intelligence (AI) based identification systems for microbes and microbial compounds.

Dadan said that in addition to developing applications based on artificial intelligence, several other research and product innovations are in the completion stage, including direct digital radiography (DDR) medical devices, intensive care unit ventilators, and clinical trials of herbal preparations.

DDR is a digital radiography device that uses digital X-fluorescent rays with a lower irradiance intensity and still produces the same image quality as conventional radiography.