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#439736 Spot’s 3.0 Update Adds Increased ...
While Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid spends its time learning how to dance and do parkour, the company's Spot quadruped is quietly getting much better at doing useful, valuable tasks in commercial environments. Solving tasks like dynamic path planning and door manipulation in a way that's robust enough that someone can buy your robot and not regret it is, I would argue, just as difficult (if not more difficult) as getting a robot to do a backflip.
With a short blog post today, Boston Dynamics is announcing Spot Release 3.0, representing more than a year of software improvements over Release 2.0 that we covered back in May of 2020. The highlights of Release 3.0 include autonomous dynamic replanning, cloud integration, some clever camera tricks, and a new ability to handle push-bar doors, and earlier today, we spoke with Spot Chief Engineer at Boston Dynamics Zachary Jackowski to learn more about what Spot's been up to.
Here are some highlights from Spot's Release 3.0 software upgrade today, lifted from this blog post which has the entire list:
Mission planning: Save time by selecting which inspection actions you want Spot to perform, and it will take the shortest path to collect your data.Dynamic replanning: Don't miss inspections due to changes on site. Spot will replan around blocked paths to make sure you get the data you need.Repeatable image capture: Capture the same image from the same angle every time with scene-based camera alignment for the Spot CAM+ pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera. Cloud-compatible: Connect Spot to AWS, Azure, IBM Maximo, and other systems with existing or easy-to-build integrations.Manipulation: Remotely operate the Spot Arm with ease through rear Spot CAM integration and split-screen view. Arm improvements also include added functionality for push-bar doors, revamped grasping UX, and updated SDK.Sounds: Keep trained bystanders aware of Spot with configurable warning sounds.The focus here is not just making Spot more autonomous, but making Spot more autonomous in some very specific ways that are targeted towards commercial usefulness. It's tempting to look at this stuff and say that it doesn't represent any massive new capabilities. But remember that Spot is a product, and its job is to make money, which is an enormous challenge for any robot, much less a relatively expensive quadruped.
For more details on the new release and a general update about Spot, we spoke with Zachary Jackowski, Spot Chief Engineer at Boston Dynamics.
IEEE Spectrum: So what's new with Spot 3.0, and why is this release important?
Zachary Jackowski: We've been focusing heavily on flexible autonomy that really works for our industrial customers. The thing that may not quite come through in the blog post is how iceberg-y making autonomy work on real customer sites is. Our blog post has some bullet points about “dynamic replanning” in maybe 20 words, but in doing that, we actually reengineered almost our entire autonomy system based on the failure modes of what we were seeing on our customer sites.
The biggest thing that changed is that previously, our robot mission paradigm was a linear mission where you would take the robot around your site and record a path. Obviously, that was a little bit fragile on complex sites—if you're on a construction site and someone puts a pallet in your path, you can't follow that path anymore. So we ended up engineering our autonomy system to do building scale mapping, which is a big part of why we're calling it Spot 3.0. This is state-of-the-art from an academic perspective, except that it's volume shipping in a real product, which to me represents a little bit of our insanity.
And one super cool technical nugget in this release is that we have a powerful pan/tilt/zoom camera on the robot that our customers use to take images of gauges and panels. We've added scene-based alignment and also computer vision model-based alignment so that the robot can capture the images from the same perspective, every time, perfectly framed. In pictures of the robot, you can see that there's this crash cage around the camera, but the image alignment stuff actually does inverse kinematics to command the robot's body to shift a little bit if the cage is including anything important in the frame.
When Spot is dynamically replanning around obstacles, how much flexibility does it have in where it goes?
There are a bunch of tricks to figuring out when to give up on a blocked path, and then it's very simple run of the mill route planning within an existing map. One of the really big design points of our system, which we spent a lot of time talking about during the design phase, is that it turns out in these high value facilities people really value predictability. So it's not desired that the robot starts wandering around trying to find its way somewhere.
Do you think that over time, your customers will begin to trust the robot with more autonomy and less predictability?
I think so, but there's a lot of trust to be built there. Our customers have to see the robot to do the job well for a significant amount of time, and that will come.
Can you talk a bit more about trying to do state-of-the-art work on a robot that's being deployed commercially?
I can tell you about how big the gap is. When we talk about features like this, our engineers are like, “oh yeah I could read this paper and pull this algorithm and code something up over a weekend and see it work.” It's easy to get a feature to work once, make a really cool GIF, and post it to the engineering group chat room. But if you take a look at what it takes to actually ship a feature at product-level, we're talking person-years to have it reach the level of quality that someone is accustomed to buying an iPhone and just having it work perfectly all the time. You have to write all the code to product standards, implement all your tests, and get everything right there, and then you also have to visit a lot of customers, because the thing that's different about mobile robotics as a product is that it's all about how the system responds to environments that it hasn't seen before.
The blog post calls Spot 3.0 “A Sensing Solution for the Real World.” What is the real world for Spot at this point, and how will that change going forward?
For Spot, 'real world' means power plants, electrical switch yards, chemical plants, breweries, automotive plants, and other living and breathing industrial facilities that have never considered the fact that a robot might one day be walking around in them. It's indoors, it's outdoors, in the dark and in direct sunlight. When you're talking about the geometric aspect of sites, that complexity we're getting pretty comfortable with.
I think the frontiers of complexity for us are things like, how do you work in a busy place with lots of untrained humans moving through it—that's an area where we're investing a lot, but it's going to be a big hill to climb and it'll take a little while before we're really comfortable in environments like that. Functional safety, certified person detectors, all that good stuff, that's a really juicy unsolved field.
Spot can now open push-bar doors, which seems like an easier problem than doors with handles, which Spot learned to open a while ago. Why'd you start with door handles first?
Push-bar doors is an easier problem! But being engineers, we did the harder problem first, because we wanted to get it done. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439147 Robots Versus Toasters: How The Power of ...
Kate Darling is an expert on human robot interaction, robot ethics, intellectual property, and all sorts of other things at the MIT Media Lab. She’s written several excellent articles for us in the past, and we’re delighted to be able to share this excerpt from her new book, which comes out today. Entitled The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots, Kate’s book is an exploration of how animals can help us understand our robot relationships, and how far that comparison can really be extended. It’s solidly based on well-cited research, including many HRI studies that we’ve written about in the past, but Kate brings everything together and tells us what it all could mean as robots continue to integrate themselves into our lives.
The following excerpt is The Power of Movement, a section from the chapter Robots Versus Toasters, which features one of the saddest robot videos I’ve ever seen, even after nearly a decade. Enjoy!
When the first black-and-white motion pictures came to the screen, an 1896 film showing in a Paris cinema is said to have caused a stampede: the first-time moviegoers, watching a giant train barrel toward them, jumped out of their seats and ran away from the screen in panic. According to film scholar Martin Loiperdinger, this story is no more than an urban legend. But this new media format, “moving pictures,” proved to be both immersive and compelling, and was here to stay. Thanks to a baked-in ability to interpret motion, we’re fascinated even by very simple animation because it tells stories we intuitively understand.
In a seminal study from the 1940s, psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel showed participants a black-and-white movie of simple, geometrical shapes moving around on a screen. When instructed to describe what they were seeing, nearly every single one of their participants interpreted the shapes to be moving around with agency and purpose. They described the behavior of the triangles and circle the way we describe people’s behavior, by assuming intent and motives. Many of them went so far as to create a complex narrative around the moving shapes. According to one participant: “A man has planned to meet a girl and the girl comes along with another man. [ . . . ] The girl gets worried and races from one corner to the other in the far part of the room. [ . . . ] The girl gets out of the room in a sudden dash just as man number two gets the door open. The two chase around the outside of the room together, followed by man number one. But they finally elude him and get away. The first man goes back and tries to open his door, but he is so blinded by rage and frustration that he can not open it.”
What brought the shapes to life for Heider and Simmel’s participants was solely their movement. We can interpret certain movement in other entities as “worried,” “frustrated,” or “blinded by rage,” even when the “other” is a simple black triangle moving across a white background. A number of studies document how much information we can extract from very basic cues, getting us to assign emotions and gender identity to things as simple as moving points of light. And while we might not run away from a train on a screen, we’re still able to interpret the movement and may even get a little thrill from watching the train in a more modern 3D screening. (There are certainly some embarrassing videos of people—maybe even of me—when we first played games wearing virtual reality headsets.)
Many scientists believe that autonomous movement activates our “life detector.” Because we’ve evolved needing to quickly identify natural predators, our brains are on constant lookout for moving agents. In fact, our perception is so attuned to movement that we separate things into objects and agents, even if we’re looking at a still image. Researchers Joshua New, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby showed people photos of a variety of scenes, like a nature landscape, a city scene, or an office desk. Then, they switched in an identical image with one addition; for example, a bird, a coffee mug, an elephant, a silo, or a vehicle. They measured how quickly the participants could identify the new appearance. People were substantially quicker and more accurate at detecting the animals compared to all of the other categories, including larger objects and vehicles.
The researchers also found evidence that animal detection activated an entirely different region of people’s brains. Research like this suggests that a specific part of our brain is constantly monitoring for lifelike animal movement. This study in particular also suggests that our ability to separate animals and objects is more likely to be driven by deep ancestral priorities than our own life experiences. Even though we have been living with cars for our whole lives, and they are now more dangerous to us than bears or tigers, we’re still much quicker to detect the presence of an animal.
The biological hardwiring that detects and interprets life in autonomous agent movement is even stronger when it has a body and is in the room with us. John Harris and Ehud Sharlin at the University of Calgary tested this projection with a moving stick. They took a long piece of wood, about the size of a twirler’s baton, and attached one end to a base with motors and eight degrees of freedom. This allowed the researchers to control the stick remotely and wave it around: fast, slow, doing figure eights, etc. They asked the experiment participants to spend some time alone in a room with the moving stick. Then, they had the participants describe their experience.
Only two of the thirty participants described the stick’s movement in technical terms. The others told the researchers that the stick was bowing or otherwise greeting them, claimed it was aggressive and trying to attack them, described it as pensive, “hiding something,” or even “purring happily.” At least ten people said the stick was “dancing.” One woman told the stick to stop pointing at her.
If people can imbue a moving stick with agency, what happens when they meet R2-D2? Given our social tendencies and ingrained responses to lifelike movement in our physical space, it’s fairly unsurprising that people perceive robots as being alive. Robots are physical objects in our space that often move in a way that seems (to our lizard brains) to have agency. A lot of the time, we don’t perceive robots as objects—to us, they are agents. And, while we may enjoy the concept of pet rocks, we love to anthropomorphize agent behavior even more.
We already have a slew of interesting research in this area. For example, people think a robot that’s present in a room with them is more enjoyable than the same robot on a screen and will follow its gaze, mimic its behavior, and be more willing to take the physical robot’s advice. We speak more to embodied robots, smile more, and are more likely to want to interact with them again. People are more willing to obey orders from a physical robot than a computer. When left alone in a room and given the opportunity to cheat on a game, people cheat less when a robot is with them. And children learn more from working with a robot compared to the same character on a screen. We are better at recognizing a robot’s emotional cues and empathize more with physical robots. When researchers told children to put a robot in a closet (while the robot protested and said it was afraid of the dark), many of the kids were hesitant.
Even adults will hesitate to switch off or hit a robot, especially when they perceive it as intelligent. People are polite to robots and try to help them. People greet robots even if no greeting is required and are friendlier if a robot greets them first. People reciprocate when robots help them. And, like the socially inept [software office assistant] Clippy, when people don’t like a robot, they will call it names. What’s noteworthy in the context of our human comparison is that the robots don’t need to look anything like humans for this to happen. In fact, even very simple robots, when they move around with “purpose,” elicit an inordinate amount of projection from the humans they encounter. Take robot vacuum cleaners. By 2004, a million of them had been deployed and were sweeping through people’s homes, vacuuming dirt, entertaining cats, and occasionally getting stuck in shag rugs. The first versions of the disc-shaped devices had sensors to detect things like steep drop-offs, but for the most part they just bumbled around randomly, changing direction whenever they hit a wall or a chair.
iRobot, the company that makes the most popular version (the Roomba) soon noticed that their customers would send their vacuum cleaners in for repair with names (Dustin Bieber being one of my favorites). Some Roomba owners would talk about their robot as though it were a pet. People who sent in malfunctioning devices would complain about the company’s generous policy to offer them a brand-new replacement, demanding that they instead fix “Meryl Sweep” and send her back. The fact that the Roombas roamed around on their own lent them a social presence that people’s traditional, handheld vacuum cleaners lacked. People decorated them, talked to them, and felt bad for them when they got tangled in the curtains.
Tech journalists reported on the Roomba’s effect, calling robovacs “the new pet craze.” A 2007 study found that many people had a social relationship with their Roombas and would describe them in terms that evoked people or animals. Today, over 80 percent of Roombas have names. I don’t have access to naming statistics for the handheld Dyson vacuum cleaner, but I’m pretty sure the number is lower.
Robots are entering our lives in many shapes and forms, and even some of the most simple or mechanical robots can prompt a visceral response. And the design of robots isn’t likely to shift away from evoking our biological reactions—especially because some robots are designed to mimic lifelike movement on purpose.
Excerpted from THE NEW BREED: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots by Kate Darling. Published by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2021 by Kate Darling. All rights reserved.
Kate’s book is available today from Annie Bloom’s Books in SW Portland, Oregon. It’s also available from Powell’s Books, and if you don’t have the good fortune of living in Portland, you can find it in both print and digital formats pretty much everywhere else books are sold.
As for Robovie, the claustrophobic robot that kept getting shoved in a closet, we recently checked in with Peter Kahn, the researcher who created the experiment nearly a decade ago, to make sure that the poor robot ended up okay. “Robovie is doing well,” Khan told us. “He visited my lab on 2-3 other occasions and participated in other experiments. Now he’s back in Japan with the person who helped make him, and who cares a lot about him.” That person is Takayuki Kanda at ATR, who we’re happy to report is still working with Robovie in the context of human-robot interaction. Thanks Robovie! Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#437673 Can AI and Automation Deliver a COVID-19 ...
Illustration: Marysia Machulska
Within moments of meeting each other at a conference last year, Nathan Collins and Yann Gaston-Mathé began devising a plan to work together. Gaston-Mathé runs a startup that applies automated software to the design of new drug candidates. Collins leads a team that uses an automated chemistry platform to synthesize new drug candidates.
“There was an obvious synergy between their technology and ours,” recalls Gaston-Mathé, CEO and cofounder of Paris-based Iktos.
In late 2019, the pair launched a project to create a brand-new antiviral drug that would block a specific protein exploited by influenza viruses. Then the COVID-19 pandemic erupted across the world stage, and Gaston-Mathé and Collins learned that the viral culprit, SARS-CoV-2, relied on a protein that was 97 percent similar to their influenza protein. The partners pivoted.
Their companies are just two of hundreds of biotech firms eager to overhaul the drug-discovery process, often with the aid of artificial intelligence (AI) tools. The first set of antiviral drugs to treat COVID-19 will likely come from sifting through existing drugs. Remdesivir, for example, was originally developed to treat Ebola, and it has been shown to speed the recovery of hospitalized COVID-19 patients. But a drug made for one condition often has side effects and limited potency when applied to another. If researchers can produce an antiviral that specifically targets SARS-CoV-2, the drug would likely be safer and more effective than a repurposed drug.
There’s one big problem: Traditional drug discovery is far too slow to react to a pandemic. Designing a drug from scratch typically takes three to five years—and that’s before human clinical trials. “Our goal, with the combination of AI and automation, is to reduce that down to six months or less,” says Collins, who is chief strategy officer at SRI Biosciences, a division of the Silicon Valley research nonprofit SRI International. “We want to get this to be very, very fast.”
That sentiment is shared by small biotech firms and big pharmaceutical companies alike, many of which are now ramping up automated technologies backed by supercomputing power to predict, design, and test new antivirals—for this pandemic as well as the next—with unprecedented speed and scope.
“The entire industry is embracing these tools,” says Kara Carter, president of the International Society for Antiviral Research and executive vice president of infectious disease at Evotec, a drug-discovery company in Hamburg. “Not only do we need [new antivirals] to treat the SARS-CoV-2 infection in the population, which is probably here to stay, but we’ll also need them to treat future agents that arrive.”
There are currentlyabout 200 known viruses that infect humans. Although viruses represent less than 14 percent of all known human pathogens, they make up two-thirds of all new human pathogens discovered since 1980.
Antiviral drugs are fundamentally different from vaccines, which teach a person’s immune system to mount a defense against a viral invader, and antibody treatments, which enhance the body’s immune response. By contrast, antivirals are chemical compounds that directly block a virus after a person has become infected. They do this by binding to specific proteins and preventing them from functioning, so that the virus cannot copy itself or enter or exit a cell.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus has an estimated 25 to 29 proteins, but not all of them are suitable drug targets. Researchers are investigating, among other targets, the virus’s exterior spike protein, which binds to a receptor on a human cell; two scissorlike enzymes, called proteases, that cut up long strings of viral proteins into functional pieces inside the cell; and a polymerase complex that makes the cell churn out copies of the virus’s genetic material, in the form of single-stranded RNA.
But it’s not enough for a drug candidate to simply attach to a target protein. Chemists also consider how tightly the compound binds to its target, whether it binds to other things as well, how quickly it metabolizes in the body, and so on. A drug candidate may have 10 to 20 such objectives. “Very often those objectives can appear to be anticorrelated or contradictory with each other,” says Gaston-Mathé.
Compared with antibiotics, antiviral drug discovery has proceeded at a snail’s pace. Scientists advanced from isolating the first antibacterial molecules in 1910 to developing an arsenal of powerful antibiotics by 1944. By contrast, it took until 1951 for researchers to be able to routinely grow large amounts of virus particles in cells in a dish, a breakthrough that earned the inventors a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1954.
And the lag between the discovery of a virus and the creation of a treatment can be heartbreaking. According to the World Health Organization, 71 million people worldwide have chronic hepatitis C, a major cause of liver cancer. The virus that causes the infection was discovered in 1989, but effective antiviral drugs didn’t hit the market until 2014.
While many antibiotics work on a range of microbes, most antivirals are highly specific to a single virus—what those in the business call “one bug, one drug.” It takes a detailed understanding of a virus to develop an antiviral against it, says Che Colpitts, a virologist at Queen’s University, in Canada, who works on antivirals against RNA viruses. “When a new virus emerges, like SARS-CoV-2, we’re at a big disadvantage.”
Making drugs to stop viruses is hard for three main reasons. First, viruses are the Spartans of the pathogen world: They’re frugal, brutal, and expert at evading the human immune system. About 20 to 250 nanometers in diameter, viruses rely on just a few parts to operate, hijacking host cells to reproduce and often destroying those cells upon departure. They employ tricks to camouflage their presence from the host’s immune system, including preventing infected cells from sending out molecular distress beacons. “Viruses are really small, so they only have a few components, so there’s not that many drug targets available to start with,” says Colpitts.
Second, viruses replicate quickly, typically doubling in number in hours or days. This constant copying of their genetic material enables viruses to evolve quickly, producing mutations able to sidestep drug effects. The virus that causes AIDS soon develops resistance when exposed to a single drug. That’s why a cocktail of antiviral drugs is used to treat HIV infection.
Finally, unlike bacteria, which can exist independently outside human cells, viruses invade human cells to propagate, so any drug designed to eliminate a virus needs to spare the host cell. A drug that fails to distinguish between a virus and a cell can cause serious side effects. “Discriminating between the two is really quite difficult,” says Evotec’s Carter, who has worked in antiviral drug discovery for over three decades.
And then there’s the money barrier. Developing antivirals is rarely profitable. Health-policy researchers at the London School of Economics recently estimated that the average cost of developing a new drug is US $1 billion, and up to $2.8 billion for cancer and other specialty drugs. Because antivirals are usually taken for only short periods of time or during short outbreaks of disease, companies rarely recoup what they spent developing the drug, much less turn a profit, says Carter.
To change the status quo, drug discovery needs fresh approaches that leverage new technologies, rather than incremental improvements, says Christian Tidona, managing director of BioMed X, an independent research institute in Heidelberg, Germany. “We need breakthroughs.”
Putting Drug Development on Autopilot
Earlier this year, SRI Biosciences and Iktos began collaborating on a way to use artificial intelligence and automated chemistry to rapidly identify new drugs to target the COVID-19 virus. Within four months, they had designed and synthesized a first round of antiviral candidates. Here’s how they’re doing it.
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STEP 1: Iktos’s AI platform uses deep-learning algorithms in an iterative process to come up with new molecular structures likely to bind to and disable a specific coronavirus protein. Illustrations: Chris Philpot
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STEP 2: SRI Biosciences’s SynFini system is a three-part automated chemistry suite for producing new compounds. Starting with a target compound from Iktos, SynRoute uses machine learning to analyze and optimize routes for creating that compound, with results in about 10 seconds. It prioritizes routes based on cost, likelihood of success, and ease of implementation.
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STEP 3: SynJet, an automated inkjet printer platform, tests the routes by printing out tiny quantities of chemical ingredients to see how they react. If the right compound is produced, the platform tests it.
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STEP 4: AutoSyn, an automated tabletop chemical plant, synthesizes milligrams to grams of the desired compound for further testing. Computer-selected “maps” dictate paths through the plant’s modular components.
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STEP 5: The most promising compounds are tested against live virus samples.
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Iktos’s AI platform was created by a medicinal chemist and an AI expert. To tackle SARS-CoV-2, the company used generative models—deep-learning algorithms that generate new data—to “imagine” molecular structures with a good chance of disabling a key coronavirus protein.
For a new drug target, the software proposes and evaluates roughly 1 million compounds, says Gaston-Mathé. It’s an iterative process: At each step, the system generates 100 virtual compounds, which are tested in silico with predictive models to see how closely they meet the objectives. The test results are then used to design the next batch of compounds. “It’s like we have a very, very fast chemist who is designing compounds, testing compounds, getting back the data, then designing another batch of compounds,” he says.
The computer isn’t as smart as a human chemist, Gaston-Mathé notes, but it’s much faster, so it can explore far more of what people in the field call “chemical space”—the set of all possible organic compounds. Unexplored chemical space is huge: Biochemists estimate that there are at least 1063 possible druglike molecules, and that 99.9 percent of all possible small molecules or compounds have never been synthesized.
Still, designing a chemical compound isn’t the hardest part of creating a new drug. After a drug candidate is designed, it must be synthesized, and the highly manual process for synthesizing a new chemical hasn’t changed much in 200 years. It can take days to plan a synthesis process and then months to years to optimize it for manufacture.
That’s why Gaston-Mathé was eager to send Iktos’s AI-generated designs to Collins’s team at SRI Biosciences. With $13.8 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, SRI Biosciences spent the last four years automating the synthesis process. The company’s automated suite of three technologies, called SynFini, can produce new chemical compounds in just hours or days, says Collins.
First, machine-learning software devises possible routes for making a desired molecule. Next, an inkjet printer platform tests the routes by printing out and mixing tiny quantities of chemical ingredients to see how they react with one another; if the right compound is produced, the platform runs tests on it. Finally, a tabletop chemical plant synthesizes milligrams to grams of the desired compound.
Less than four months after Iktos and SRI Biosciences announced their collaboration, they had designed and synthesized a first round of antiviral candidates for SARS-CoV-2. Now they’re testing how well the compounds work on actual samples of the virus.
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63 possible druglike molecules, 99.9 percent have never been synthesized.
Theirs isn’t the only collaborationapplying new tools to drug discovery. In late March, Alex Zhavoronkov, CEO of Hong Kong–based Insilico Medicine, came across a YouTube video showing three virtual-reality avatars positioning colorful, sticklike fragments in the side of a bulbous blue protein. The three researchers were using VR to explore how compounds might bind to a SARS-CoV-2 enzyme. Zhavoronkov contacted the startup that created the simulation—Nanome, in San Diego—and invited it to examine Insilico’s AI-generated molecules in virtual reality.
Insilico runs an AI platform that uses biological data to train deep-learning algorithms, then uses those algorithms to identify molecules with druglike features that will likely bind to a protein target. A four-day training sprint in late January yielded 100 molecules that appear to bind to an important SARS-CoV-2 protease. The company recently began synthesizing some of those molecules for laboratory testing.
Nanome’s VR software, meanwhile, allows researchers to import a molecular structure, then view and manipulate it on the scale of individual atoms. Like human chess players who use computer programs to explore potential moves, chemists can use VR to predict how to make molecules more druglike, says Nanome CEO Steve McCloskey. “The tighter the interface between the human and the computer, the more information goes both ways,” he says.
Zhavoronkov sent data about several of Insilico’s compounds to Nanome, which re-created them in VR. Nanome’s chemist demonstrated chemical tweaks to potentially improve each compound. “It was a very good experience,” says Zhavoronkov.
Meanwhile, in March, Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., of Japan, invited Schrödinger, a New York–based company that develops chemical-simulation software, to join an alliance working on antivirals. Schrödinger’s AI focuses on the physics of how proteins interact with small molecules and one another.
The software sifts through billions of molecules per week to predict a compound’s properties, and it optimizes for multiple desired properties simultaneously, says Karen Akinsanya, chief biomedical scientist and head of discovery R&D at Schrödinger. “There’s a huge sense of urgency here to come up with a potent molecule, but also to come up with molecules that are going to be well tolerated” by the body, she says. Drug developers are seeking compounds that can be broadly used and easily administered, such as an oral drug rather than an intravenous drug, she adds.
Schrödinger evaluated four protein targets and performed virtual screens for two of them, a computing-intensive process. In June, Google Cloud donated the equivalent of 16 million hours of Nvidia GPU time for the company’s calculations. Next, the alliance’s drug companies will synthesize and test the most promising compounds identified by the virtual screens.
Other companies, including Amazon Web Services, IBM, and Intel, as well as several U.S. national labs are also donating time and resources to the Covid-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. The consortium is supporting 87 projects, which now have access to 6.8 million CPU cores, 50,000 GPUs, and 600 petaflops of computational resources.
While advanced technologies could transform early drug discovery, any new drug candidate still has a long road after that. It must be tested in animals, manufactured in large batches for clinical trials, then tested in a series of trials that, for antivirals, lasts an average of seven years.
In May, the BioMed X Institute in Germany launched a five-year project to build a Rapid Antiviral Response Platform, which would speed drug discovery all the way through manufacturing for clinical trials. The €40 million ($47 million) project, backed by drug companies, will identify outside-the-box proposals from young scientists, then provide space and funding to develop their ideas.
“We’ll focus on technologies that allow us to go from identification of a new virus to 10,000 doses of a novel potential therapeutic ready for trials in less than six months,” says BioMed X’s Tidona, who leads the project.
While a vaccine will likely arrive long before a bespoke antiviral does, experts expect COVID-19 to be with us for a long time, so the effort to develop a direct-acting, potent antiviral continues. Plus, having new antivirals—and tools to rapidly create more—can only help us prepare for the next pandemic, whether it comes next month or in another 102 years.
“We’ve got to start thinking differently about how to be more responsive to these kinds of threats,” says Collins. “It’s pushing us out of our comfort zones.”
This article appears in the October 2020 print issue as “Automating Antivirals.” Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots