The tech-giant IBM has announced a launch of services and resources to help researchers to fight the novel coronavirus. The initiative aka U.S. COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium aims to harness high-performing computing power to help the people fighting the virus and the disease in three ways - Artificial Intelligence (AI) support towards the search for relevant scientific information and research for potential treatments and to provide evidence-based curated content to frontline health workers. “Today, we are making available multiple free resources from across IBM to help healthcare researchers, doctors and scientists around the world accelerate COVID-19 drug discovery: from gathering insights to applying the latest virus genomic information and identifying potential targets for treatments, to creating new drug molecule candidates,” said Dario Gil, the director of IBM research in the IBM press release. 

IBM’s cloud-based AI research resource offers the insights of novel coronavirus and COVID-19 carried out by healthcare agencies, governments and medical teams from across the world to researchers. The AI has been trained on thousands of scientific papers contained by the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), an initiative by the White House and leading research organisations of the USA. It returns answers to specific queries to extracting critical COVID-19 knowledge by scouring through thousands of research papers. 

IBM also has made its molecular discovery and the interactive molecular exploration tool open-licensed to help discover potential COVID-19 treatments through the identification of novel peptides, proteins, drug candidates and materials. This AI technology has already identified 3,000 new small molecules as potential COVID-19 therapeutic candidates. The discovery may be helpful for researchers to better understand molecule characteristic, their relation with COVID-19 and further identify candidates that may have potential towards drug development. To complement this, Gil also announced that IBM’s Functional Genome Platform that supports genome feature discovery will be provided for free till the pandemic lasts. “Built to discover the molecular features in viral and bacterial genomes, this cloud-based repository and research tool includes genes, proteins and other molecular targets from sequenced viral and bacterial organisms in one place with connections pre-computed to help accelerate the discovery of molecular targets required for drug design, test development and treatment,” Gil explained. 

IBM has also provided open-access to over 1,000 curated content pieces from IBM Micromedex and EBSCO DynaMed on novel coronavirus and the disease to the healthcare professionals on the frontline. The content is evidence-based and responds to search queries. IBM Micromedex provides a large online reference databases for medication information to more than 4,500 hospitals and health systems worldwide. EBSCO DynaMed provides peer-reviewed clinical content in 28 specialities for comprehensive disease topics, health conditions and abnormal findings, to highly focused topics on evaluation, differential diagnosis and management. The platform also helps healthcare professionals provide patients with consumer-friendly patient education handouts with relevant, actionable medical information.