Cure for deadly lung disease hiding in plain sight all along

Australian scientists are using AI to figure out new benefits of different medicines. This is how significant it is.

Australian researchers who discovered “the old fashioned way” that an existing drug could be repurposed to better treat a chronic lung condition have turned to AI to fast-track what other medicines could be reimagined to cure disease.

Respiratory physician Philip Bardin and the team at the Hudson Institute of Medical Research say using AI could also help deliver substantial economic savings to the health budget.

The Professor of Respiratory Medicine and Emeritus Director, Monash Lung Sleep Allergy & Immunology, he says hundreds of current drugs could have benefits beyond their original uses, and AI could revolutionise how to identify them.

The Hudson Institute’s Philip Bardin, Professor of Respiratory Medicine and Emeritus Director, Monash Lung Sleep Allergy & Immunology and Dr Belinda Thomas. Supplied.

After five years of research by humans, the team found a drug commonly used to treat lung scarring could also treat Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), but with fewer side effects.

Working with Dr Belinda Thomas and Professor Jane Bourke at Hudson Institute, Monash Health and the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute, the results were published in the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology.

It prompted a Lancet journal editor to ask them to investigate the impact AI would have had on their research.

Professor Bardin said it would have been game-changing and likely to have slashed the research time frame from five years to just a year.

He said the team wrote another paper, published in Lancet Respiratory Medicine, about how AI could help find many other cures hiding in plain sight.

“I just looked in disbelief because we found through AI many of the medicines already in our pharmacies could be used in a slightly different way in different diseases,” Professor Bardin said.

Professor in Pharmacology at Monash University Jane Bourke was part of the research team to discover an existing drug could be repurposed to better treat COPD. Supplied.

He says it will offer significant economic benefits because the research has already been done on these medicines, so they are safe, and they could be readily applied to a new disease.

Professor Bardin said the team started looking for an alternative treatment for COPD because patients wanted something to replace steroids that can have serious side effects.

COPD is a range of debilitating lung diseases that includes bronchitis and emphysema and costs the Australian health budget more than $800m a year. It is also deadly, claiming the lives of more 7600 Australians annually.

“The great benefit of this treatment if translated into the clinic is that people could come off steroids,” Professor Bardin said. “Detrimental effects of steroids build up over time so that by the age of 60 many people start having severe side effects such as cardiac disease, hypertension, diabetes, skin problems and osteoporosis.”

The researchers say AI provides a tool that can help revolutionise how medicines can be repurposed to treat disease.

He said AI can screen millions of compounds to quickly pinpoint which one would work for a particular condition.

“It is possible that we could cure diseases using drugs that are available that nobody could have thought about, if not for AI.”

The researchers wrote that there has never been a systematic way of integrating a mountain of disease pathologies and existing drug information and that AI provides a tool that can connect the domains.