The Paper's reporter Zhang Jing
On November 30, Zhang Yaqin, Chair Professor of Intelligent Science at Tsinghua University and Dean of the Institute of Intelligent Industry of Tsinghua University, said at the SUITE2022 Intelligent Future Conference hosted by Qubit that AI is accelerating the development of life health and biomedicine, life sciences and biopharmaceuticals are developing in a more rapid, precise, safe, economical and inclusive direction, and the next 10 years is a great opportunity for the integration of biopharmaceuticals and artificial intelligence.
Zhang Yaqin believes that the biggest breakthrough in the past 30 years is digitalization, from content digitization to enterprise digitalization, and now entering the digitization of the physical world, the biological world is also digitizing, and the brain, proteins, genes, and cell molecules are all being digitized.
"Rapid advances in artificial intelligence, algorithms, computing power, and systems have made it possible for large amounts of data to be used, while ARTIFICIAL intelligence is also driving the automation of biological experiments." Zhang Yaqin said that AI is accelerating the development of life health and biomedicine, AI allows gene editing to find targets more accurately and quickly, artificial intelligence program AlphaFold 2 has made new progress in protein structure prediction, and the development cycle of new crown vaccines has been greatly reduced.
"Chinese scientists found the gene sequence in January 2020 for the first time after the emergence of the new crown virus, and after 3 months, the protein structure was immediately resolved, and the interaction mode between the virus and the person was also resolved, and the vaccine entered the clinic at the end of last year and was used on a large scale this year." Zhang Yaqin said that whether it is an inactivated vaccine or an mRNA vaccine, the new crown vaccine or the fastest use of computer science and artificial intelligence in human history to accelerate vaccine development.
Although there are many places where AI and life sciences can cooperate, there are also barriers. AI and life sciences are two different language systems, people who do AI see a variety of different neural networks, models, life scientists see protein cells and various structural functions, the focus is on how to seamlessly connect the two industries. In addition, Zhang Yaqin said that the transparency, explainability, privacy and security of algorithms, and ethics also need to be paid attention to.
In order to break the barriers between AI and life sciences, the Intelligent Industry Research Institute of Tsinghua University proposed the AI+life science wall-breaking plan, defined the core frontier research tasks of AI+ life sciences, crossed the gap between the field of life and health and artificial intelligence, promoted the deep cross-integration of AI and life sciences, and built a research and technology ecology of AI+ life sciences. On the one hand, it is necessary to reduce the threshold for life scientists to use cutting-edge AI technology and accelerate life science research discoveries, on the other hand, it is necessary to provide life science tasks/data for artificial intelligence experts to accelerate the breakthrough of life computing algorithms.
Zhang yaqin was awarded an IEEE Fellowship in 1997, the IEEE Technology Pioneer Award in 2004, the National Academy of Engineering (ATSE) in Australia in 2017, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. Founded in 2020, the Intelligent Industry Research Institute of Tsinghua University will use artificial intelligence technology to empower industrial upgrading and promote social progress. Through the dual engine of innovation of universities and enterprises, we will break through the core technology of artificial intelligence, cultivate leading talents in the intelligent industry, and promote the leapfrog development of the intelligent industry.
Editor-in-Charge: Li Yuequn
Proofreader: Luan Meng
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