In the year 2020, Artificial Intelligence (AI) emerged as a messiah that helped save millions of human lives, globally, as it was extensively used to develop cures and vaccinations against the COVID-19 virus. And now, it's on yet another mission. 

Alphabet-owned lab, DeepMind, is collaborating with the Geneva-based Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDI) to treat Chagas disease, Leishmaniasis, and other such prevalent diseases in the developing world. Chagas disease and Leishmaniasis affect up to 23 million people worldwide. 

While scientists spent years earlier in labs to map protein structures to tackle diseases, DeepMind's AlphaFold program achieved results with similar accuracies within a few days. 

AlphaFold and DNDI have already made strides in their research. The program has found a new, safer treatment for the sleeping sickness disease; it replaced melarsoprol - a toxic compound that can be fatal to one in 20 people - with a safer substitute, fexinidazole.

  “We went from something that was awful to something that’s completely safe, and works in all forms of the disease,” says Ben Perry, a medicinal chemist and project leader at DNDi. “And in two years' time, we hope to have a single-dose cure. But unfortunately for Chagas disease and Leishmaniasis, this strategy hasn’t worked.”

It has proven difficult in the case of Chagas disease particularly because to cure the patient, every last parasite needs to be eliminated from the cells of the patient. Although, there may be hope. For the past 18 months, DNDi and a team of infectious disease researchers at the University of Washington, University of Dundee, and GlaxoSmithKline are studying a molecule that binds to a protein on Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite that causes Chagas disease. This enables it to shut down the parasite and kill it.

The scientists find this a promising start and want to study the protein structure further to understand how the drug will be able to shut down the parasite's functioning. While earlier, it would be a laborious, complex experiment that would have spanned over years, with AlphaFold, they have already received a computationally generated prediction of its shape. 

“This could allow us to crack Chagas disease and Leishmaniasis a lot more quickly than it looked like we were going to be able to do a couple of years ago,” says Perry. “If you can quickly get these protein structures, you can design multiple drug candidates, so you have lots of shots on goal for clinical trials.”

If AlphaFold does help fast-track a new treatment for Chagas disease or Leishmaniasis, it could soon be utilized in many other areas of medicine. DeepMind’s head of AI for science, Pushmeet Kohli, says that the technology could also be applied to cancer and other chronic illnesses. 

Further, there is hope that AlphaFold can democratize drug discovery, making it possible for scientists in low-income nations – who previously lacked the resources to study viral or parasitic infections in their local region – to work on ways of developing new treatments.