One of the many findings from the ongoing Covid enquiry in the UK is that things could have gone better.
Although the pandemic didn’t kill half the world’s population like the Black Death in the 1300s, it did kill 3 million people worldwide, despite all the advances in medical science that have taken place in the last 100 years.
And according to many public health experts, the problem of global pandemics isn’t going away any time soon. In fact, it’s about to get a lot worse.
That’s the view of the UK Health Security Agency boss Jenny Harries, who spends a lot of time worrying about where the next pandemic is coming from on our behalf.
“The bad news is that we know the risks for pandemics and new diseases globally are increasing for a number of reasons,’ says Harries, who points to climate change as an accelerating factor.
“Climate change is hastening habitat alteration and movement of animal species. Urbanisation is encouraging encroachment and overlaps between animal and human interfaces and transport changes.”
Dr Jong-Yoon Chun, a Korean expert in medical molecular diagnostics, argues that climate change and extreme weather, from unusually hot conditions to unusually wet conditions, stresses pathogens in the same way that it stresses humans. “The result is that they mutate faster, to create new diseases in humans, or animals.”
“What concerns me most is waves of pandemics – or Multi-pandemics – which will be much more serious,” he warns.
So that’s the bad news. The good news is that Dr Chun and his molecular diagnostics company Seegene is working hard on a solution in the shape of the company’s syndromic, real-time PCR (Polymerase chain reaction) technology, which can detect a wide range of pathogens.
The company teamed up with Microsoft’s Azure Open AI at the beginning of the year to supercharge its PCR technology and has now managed to come up with a way to dramatically reduce the time it takes to analyse tests and predict pandemic outbreaks.
Seegene and Microsoft showcased their developments at an event in London last month, hosted by science publisher Springer Nature, detailing how the integration of Microsoft’s Azure Open AI into the research and planning module of Seegene’s automated product development system was able to dramatically reduce the time needed to process and analyse relevant information from published scientific literature and to analyse samples.
“Manually we need three expert scientists who take days to analyse samples. But with AI we can get the results in just minutes,’ declares Dr Chun.
“Until now, scientists and experts have been confined to limited local data, usually generated by themselves. However, access to diagnostic information shared across the world powered with Microsoft’s AI technology will enable swift response to any emerging diseases,” says Chun, who adds that the results can be applied to any disease.
“Human papilloma virus which ultimately causes cervical cancer is another disease which can be easily detected with a low-cost PCR test, and largely eliminated. If women only knew they had the virus they could take the steps to avoid the cancer, which can take 10-15 years to develop, right at the beginning, which is the best place to handle it.”
Seegene and Microsoft are in the process of forming a series of partnerships with local scientists and experts to develop diagnostic tests tailored to the needs of their communities and fields, spanning a wide range of human and non-human diseases.
The aim is to create ‘a world free from diseases’ – a future where people no longer suffer from infectious diseases and cancers, and where animals and plants can thrive without illness.”
Microsoft’s director of population health Geraint Lewis observes that the rate of development of AI in medical diagnostics is mind-blowingly rapid, doubling every six months.
“So, it’s quite a sobering thought for me to think how things might have been different if the Covid pandemic had occurred in the post Generative AI era. How many lives would have been saved?”
The challenge now is to look forward to the next pandemic and to ask ourselves, what will we do differently? How are we going to make the most of the fact that tasks that experts previously took many weeks to complete, can now be done in minutes.”
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