On January 27, 2020, there were still fewer than 1,000 confirmed reported cases of SARS-COV2 in the world. Within a week, the leadership team of Cyclica—a data-driven, drug discovery biotech company based in Toronto—met with China’s Institute of Materia Medica about sharing their AI-enabled polypharmacology platform to begin isolating potential therapies through machine learning.

For the past eight years, Cyclica has been working on the cutting edge of a new kind of research that uses computational techniques including AI to analyze the human proteome alongside various molecules and chemical compounds that can make up new drugs. The technology was initially developed to help track and reduce potential side effects from new medicines, and speed their development and time to market.

In the case of COVID-19 applications, researchers at Cyclica, along with those using Polypharm DB, could put the same techniques to work in order to more quickly identify potential therapies for this new coronavirus.