A Yale research team, with contributions from WuXi NextCODE’s artificial intelligence (AI) and sequencing teams, has discovered a novel mechanism regulating how blood vessels grow.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can already catch a criminal and identify the right patients for certain types of surgery. But those challenges involve relatively few parameters compared to number of parameters or features involved in linking the 3 billion bases in the human genome with other ‘omics data and all the complexity of human biology. For that very reason, the promise of AI in genomics is as necessary as it is enticing, and WuXi NextCODE is committed to pushing the frontier of this emerging field.
This week, I am encouraged by results from a study published in the latest edition of Nature, which describes how a well-known growth factor may play a previously unknown role in some important diseases. That report, led by Yale University scientist Michael Simons, investigates blood vessel growth regulation—a crucial process in some very common conditions, including cardiovascular disease and cancer. Our Shanghai team provided RNA sequencing for this study. Our Cambridge AI team applied some of the most advanced statistic in their toolset to take the data analysis to the next level.
Simons’ team studied knock out mice, whose fibroblast growth factor (FGF) receptor genes were turned off. The scientists were able to prove, for the first time, that FGFs have a key role in blood vessel growth, uncovering some metabolic processes that were “a complete surprise,” according to scientists on the team. Further, they mapped out pathways that could help provide new drug leads.
It’s inspiring to see scientists from around the world using top-notch technology to collaborate on pivotal research questions. This study involved scientists in six different countries.
This FGF study also comes on the heels of our recent announcement about how our deepCODE approach classified 27 different tumor types with greater than 95% accuracy when applied across approximately 9,000 human tumors from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) collection. [LINK: https://www.wuxinextcode.com/highlights/posters-at-aacr/#/brief–using-ai]
With the rapid rate of progress, it’s not surprising that AI is finding success in genomics. Today’s informatics capabilities allow for assimilating larger and larger datasets with AI applications, and the field is evolving at a rapid pace. Google alone published more than 200 papers on AI in 2016. Like us, they use a deep learning approach.
From facial recognition to genomic solutions
Each AI problem has a different scale. In facial recognition, AI applications analyze relatively few features in the human face (about two dozen). Digital scans of the human eye that use AI techniques are able to segment patients before eye surgeries, and this entails algorithms that consider hundreds of features.
Genomics, of course, involves looking at any number of feature sets among billions of possibilities. It’s an immense challenge, but I think it’s perfectly suited to AI. And with deep-learning tools, we can fish out many more insights than with traditional analyses.
Our goal is to see how AI can help researchers achieve better results in identifying and evaluating new medicines, pinpointing risk factors and disease drivers, finding new combination therapies that work better than single drugs, and more. Our deepCODE tools comprise a novel, multinomial statistical-learning method and deep learning classification strategy. It’s an advanced approach to AI.
This week’s Nature paper is another encouraging sign.
Many of the stickiest problems in medicine are longstanding. The role of FGFs in blood vessel development was poorly understood until now. This group’s findings may help open new avenues of research.
Our team is always seeking to tackle problems with the latest approaches and technologies. Now, in the age of big data, it makes sense to start letting computers do more and more of the work, even some of the actual thinking. Certainly, we pick the questions and frame them. But then, let’s load the data and let the machines help us find the answers. If we can polish this process, and apply it to a growing number of problems, new answers and insights are sure to come.
