Terminally ill patient is 'cured' of immune illness after AI identifies drug for 'repurposing'
A terminally ill patient about to enter a hospice is in remission after AI found him a life-saving drug.
Many people with serious illnesses, from cancer to heart failure, survive for years on various treatments before all available drugs stop working and they face a death sentence.
Artificial intelligence can help by rapidly searching through thousands of existing drugs for unexpected ones which might work.
The New England Journal of Medicine has now reported the case of a man with a rare immune condition whose life was saved by the technology.
The patient, who is remaining anonymous, has idiopathic multicentric Castleman's disease (iMCD), which has an especially poor survival rate and few treatment options.
But an AI tool searched through 4,000 existing medications, discovering adalimumab - a monoclonal antibody used for conditions ranging from arthritis to Crohn's disease - could work.
Dr David Fajgenbaum, senior author of the published study on the breakthrough, from the University of Pennsylvania, said: 'The patient in this study was entering hospice care, but now he is almost two years into remission.
'This is remarkable not just for this patient and iMCD, but for the implications it has for the use of machine learning to find treatments for even more conditions.'
Artificial intelligence can help by rapidly searching through thousands of existing drugs for unexpected ones which might work (stock image)
The patient, who is remaining anonymous, has idiopathic multicentric Castleman's disease (iMCD), which has an especially poor survival rate and few treatment options (stock image)
An AI tool searched through 4,000 medications, discovering adalimumab (pictured) - a monoclonal antibody used for conditions ranging from arthritis to Crohn's disease - could work
Many diseases appear very different, in their symptoms and outcomes, but share genetic mutations or molecular triggers in the body, and can therefore be treated with the same drug.
The process of using an existing drug for a purpose it was not originally intended for is called drug repurposing.
Previously UK researchers have used AI to propose combinations of existing drugs for incurable brain cancer in children.
The study team who identified the treatment for the terminally ill man in the US found the adalimumab he was given tackles a protein called tumour necrosis factor (TNF), which appears to play a key role in iMCD.
The immune disease can cause damage to the body's tissues and organs, which may lead to life-threatening multi-organ failure.
Dr Fajgenbaum, who has iMCD himself, said: 'There are probably a few hundred patients in the United States and few thousand patients around the world who, each year, are in the midst of a deadly flare-up like this patient had been experiencing.
'More research is needed, but I'm hopeful that many of them could benefit from this new treatment.'
