Hi, it's Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. Today's computing power and machine learning makes possible faster success in finding drugs to treat disease or find crucial vaccines. In today's talk from TED 2020, the prequel, bioengineering professor Jim Collins, shares with us an AI project

that could lead to the discovery of best ways to treat the virus ravaging the planet right now.

This ambitious idea is part of the Audacious Project, Ted's initiative to inspire and fund

global change. Learn more about it at audaciousproject.org.

So how are we going to beat this novel coronavirus by using our best tools, our science,

and our technology? In my lab, we're using the tools of artificial intelligence and synthetic

biology to speed up the fight against this pandemic.

Our work was originally designed to tackle the antibiotic resistance crisis.

Our project seeks to harness the power of machine learning to replenish our antibiotic arsenal

and avoid a globally devastating post-anibiotic error.

Importantly, the same technology can be used to search for antiviral compounds that could help

us fight the current pandemic. Machine learning is turning the traditional model of drug discovery

on its head.

With this approach, instead of painstakingly testing thousands of existing molecules one by one in a lab for their effectiveness, we can train a computer to explore the exponentially larger

space of essentially all possible molecules that could be synthesized.

And thus, instead of looking for a needle in a haystack,

we can use the giant magnet of computing power to find many needles in multiple haystack simultaneously.

We've already had some early success.

Recently, we used machine learning to discover new antibiotics can help us fight off the bacterial infections that can occur alongside SARS-CoB2 infections.

Two months ago, Ted's audacious project approved funding for us to massively scale up our work with the goal of discovering seven new classes of antibiotics against seven of the world's deadly bacterial pathogens over the next seven years.

For context, the number of new class of antibiotics that have been discovered over the last three decades is zero.

While the quest for new antibiotics is for our medium term future, the novel coronavirus poses an immediate deadly threat.

...