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Using AI to Find New Uses for Existing Medications


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Foil-packed pills.

Using artificial intelligence could help speed up the process of finding new uses for existing drugs.

Credit: Pixabay

Ohio State University (OSU) researchers used artificial intelligence to process massive datasets in order to determine whether existing drugs could be applied to illnesses for which they were not previously used.

The researchers used insurance claims data on roughly 1.2 million heart-disease patients, which included information on assigned treatments, disease outcomes, and various values for potential confounders (something other than the thing being studied that could be causing the results seen).

The study, which focused on repurposing medications to prevent heart failure and stroke in patients with coronary artery disease, identified nine drugs considered likely to provide those therapeutic benefits.

OSU's Ping Zhang said the model used in this study “could be applied to any disease, if you can define the disease outcome."

From Ohio State University
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Abstracts Copyright © 2021 SmithBucklin, Washington, DC, USA


 

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