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Google has built an artificial intelligence laboratory assistant to help scientists accelerate biomedical research, as companies race to create specialised applications from the cutting-edge technology.
The US tech group’s so-called co-scientist tool helps researchers identify gaps in their knowledge and propose new ideas that could speed up scientific discovery.
“What we’re trying to do with our project is see whether technology like the AI co-scientist can give these researchers superpowers,” said Alan Karthikesalingam, a senior staff clinician scientist at Google.
Google’s new tool comes as tech companies are spending billions of dollars on AI models and products, believing the technology can change industries from healthcare to energy and education.
OpenAI, Perplexity and German drugmaker BioNTech and its London-based AI subsidiary InstaDeep have recently launched their own AI research tools, while Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold has shown how the fast-developing technology can accelerate scientific research.
Early tests of Google’s new tool with experts from Stanford University, Imperial College London and Houston Methodist hospital found it was able to generate scientific hypotheses that showed promising results.
The tool was able to reach the same conclusions — for a novel gene transfer mechanism that helps scientists understand the spread of antimicrobial resistance — as a new breakthrough from researchers at Imperial.
Imperial’s results were not in the public domain as they were being peer-reviewed in a top scientific journal. This showed that Google’s co-scientist tool was able to reach the same hypothesis using AI reasoning in a matter of just days, compared with the years the university team spent researching the problem.
The AI tool was also able to help researchers at Stanford find existing drugs that could be repurposed to treat liver fibrosis, a serious disease where scar tissue builds up in the organ. Google’s co-scientist suggested two drug types that the Stanford scientists found helped with treating the illness.
“We think it will be a tool that has the potential to change how we approach science,” said José Penadés, a professor at Imperial’s Department of Infectious Disease and the Fleming Initiative, who was part of the team behind the novel gene transfer mechanism study.
The tool works by using several AI agents that mimic the scientific process. For example, one AI agent is specialised in generating ideas, and another in reflecting and reviewing those ideas, said Vivek Natarajan, research scientist at Google.
The model is able to retrieve information from scientific papers and specialist databases that are freely available online, and other tools, such as AlphaFold. It then analyses the information it has been given and presents researchers with a ranked list of proposals with explanations and links to sources. Researchers can then refine these proposals.
Tools such as Google’s AI co-scientist could help scientists keep up with all the new information generated in their fields, said Jakob Foerster, an associate professor at the University of Oxford, who has also developed AI research tools. “I think it’s super valuable,” he said.