In January 2020, as doctors struggled to treat the first coronavirus patients, data scientists and biochemists at BenevolentAI turned to artificial intelligence to hunt for a drug to help.
The researchers had only a few clues about how the new virus operated. They fed them to their algorithm and set it to work searching 50mn medical journal articles in just a few hours. Together, the scientists and the algorithm deepened their understanding of which biological pathways a drug should target and searched for approved drugs to repurpose.
