NIH https://www.nih.gov in a funded project with Dartmouth https://dartmouth.edu is working to develop a fully functioning prototype tool called Pathway Hypothesis Knowledgebase (PHK), an Artificial Intelligence tool.
Earlier this year, it was announced that the project would receive anticipated funding for $3.4 million for five years. Developing the PHK prototype drew data from clinical research and from NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) https://ncats.nih.gov program.
Eugene Santos Jr. Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth is collaborating with engineering colleagues at Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) https://tuftsclsi.org, and industry partner IOMICS https://iomics.us to further develop PHK to include an AI-based system. He believes AI will generate new insights to help accelerate the work of the biomedical researcher
The plan is for the AI-based system to analyze patients’ clinical and genomic data and research and the relationship between biochemical pathways that drive health and disease. Eugene Santos imagines that once work on PHK is completed, doctors could treat a patient using historical data from other patients with similar symptoms and genomic profiles.
He also suggests that PHK could be used to determine additional uses for approved drugs already on the market, and could quickly determine possible drug treatments for new diseases such as COVID-19 and also impact how we treat cancer plus a multitude of complex multi-faceted diseases.