By discovering drugs that inhibit the kappa-opioid receptor, Leslie Salas Estrada, in the lab of Marta Filizola, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, hopes to alleviate opioid addiction.  

 Kappa-opioid receptors are known to mediate brain rewards. If a person is addicted and is trying to quit, at some point, they will show withdrawal symptoms which can be very hard to overcome. After a lot of opioid exposure, the brain needs more drugs.  

 Blocking the activity of the kappa opioid receptor has been shown in animal models to reduce this need to use drugs in the withdrawal period. However, discovering drugs that can block the activity of a protein can be a long and expensive process. 

 Using computational tools can make it more efficient, but it can take months to screen billions of chemical compounds. So instead, Salas Estarada is using AI to optimize the process. According to the researcher, AI has the advantage of being able to take vast amounts of information and learn to recognize patterns from it. They believe ML can aid in leveraging the information that can be derived from large chemical databases to design new drugs from scratch. This reduces the time and cost of drug discovery. 

 Using information about the kappa-opioid receptor and non-drugs, they trained a computer model to generate compounds that might block the receptor with a reinforcement learning algorithm that rewarded properties that are favorable for drug treatments.  

 So far, the team has identified several compounds that have promising properties and are working with collaborators to synthesized them and eventually test their ability to block the receptor in cells,  

According to a statement provided to ANI, Estarada hopes to aid people struggling with addiction.