Machine versus virus: Deploying artificial intelligence against future pandemics

How do you design a vaccine against a virus not yet known to man? Doing so could help arm us against future pandemics, by rapidly compressing the time it takes to develop protective vaccines. Most vaccines work by showing the immune system pieces of viral protein, which are often unstable or fall apart when produced in a lab or manufacturing facility. Designing vaccines against new pathogens requires not only the ability to predict what sort of proteins they might contain, but finding ways to stabilise them. AI programmes are being used to design prototype vaccines that could rapidly be married to an existing vaccine platform, such as mRNA, to start production of vaccines for clinical testing within weeks of the detection of a new pandemic threat. Proteins are chains of amino acids that can twist and loop into a bewildering array of structures, and these structures determine how each protein functions, and how...