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IBM Shares COVID-19-Related Resources for Researchers

Offer includes cloud-based AI tool and licensed databases that enable rapid search across diverse data sources.

• By James E. Powell
• April 7, 2020

IBM Research has announced it is sharing several free resources and tools from across the computing giant 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.” The announcement was made in a blog post from Dario Gil, Director of IBM Research.

For Further Reading: AI's Impact on Coronavirus AI Fights the Pandemic (And How You Can Get Involved) Data Management During and After Coronavirus More COVID-19 news is available at our sister websites, FCW and GCN.

The resources, some still in “exploratory stages,” are available at no cost to qualified researchers. 

Data about the pandemic is being collected globally, with “vast troves” already collected “that could prove relevant to COVID-19.” However, with so much data in disparate locations, the problem is to “efficiently aggregate and analyze that data in ways that can yield scientific insights.” That’s what IBM’s announcement aims to tackle.

According to Gil,

To help researchers access structured and unstructured data quickly, we are offering a cloud-based AI research resource that has been trained on a corpus of thousands of scientific papers contained in the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) prepared by the White House and a coalition of research groups, and licensed databases from the DrugBank, Clinicaltrials.gov, and GenBank. This tool uses our advanced AI and allows researchers to pose specific queries to the collections of papers and to extract critical COVID-19 knowledge quickly.

Gil also pointed out that its new, AI-generative framework can quickly identify novel peptides, proteins, drug candidates, and materials for researchers in their quest to find a drug that is safe and effective against the virus.

Researchers can learn more about the project and request access here

IBM isn’t the only company sharing COVID-19 related resources. Service Objects, for example, recently announced it has created an enhanced COVID-19 case data set for free download.