How did Baidu Employ AI as a Tool for Vaccine Development?

Baidu enhanced the vaccine development through AI algorithms for faster mRNA structuring

The Covid-19 pandemic has drastically affected the world. Since last year, we have been witnessing the fatality of the pandemic, and it continues. Today, the pandemic is spreading like a wildfire with the mutated virus, across the globe. The nations have been stressing the significance of vaccines to fight this dreadful virus. Since 2020, many indigenous and foreign labs and medical research teams have been developing vaccines. Let us focus on a similar vaccine development initiative put forth by Baidu during the peak of 2020.

Baidu and AI against Covid-19

Baidu is one of the largest AI companies that offer internet-related services based in China. The company is known as the 'Chinese Google' and has a great role in boosting China's economy with other tech giants. The Covid-19 pandemic brought the largest economies to their knees and the world witnessed a rapid acceleration of technology adoption during last year. The Internet flooded with reports show how disruptive technologies like AI and machine learning are impacting vaccine development, contact tracing, and aiding the frontline workers in the fight. Many companies came forward to contribute towards vaccine development. We saw how a German company BioNTech partnered with Pfizer to efficiently make vaccines.

Along similar lines, we can discuss the step taken by Baidu to battle against the virus by employing its AI tools in the development of vaccines. In the beginning, when the pandemic unleashes, China was drastically affected by it and rapidly spread worldwide. During this peak phase, the Baidu research team developed an AI tool, LinearFold in collaboration with Oregon State University and the University of Rochester. This AI algorithm could efficiently aid in reducing the time taken to analyze the structure of this virus. The challenge with the traditional RNA folding algorithms was its relatively slower pace in predicting the second RNA (Ribo Nucleic Acid) structure of the virus, compared to Baidu's artificial intelligence tool. Several reports revealed that the LinearFold algorithm could reduce the time in analyzing the second RNA structure of the Covid virus from 55 minutes to 27 seconds, which is 120 times faster. Baidu developed the algorithm using computational linguistics, incremental parsing algorithms, and applied beam search.

Another milestone

The widespread acceptance of mRNA vaccines was based on the findings that the secondary structure of mRNA could lead to the development of mRNA vaccines. These mRNA vaccines instruct the cells in our body to make proteins that can trigger immune responses and thus impacts the process of protein translation. However, developing these mRNA vaccines will depend on the time taken to analyze the structure of the virus. To enable the faster development of these vaccines, Baidu developed another AI algorithm that used deep learning,  called the LinearDesign in May 2020. The linear design was a breakthrough in the vaccine development process since it could design a stable mRNA sequence. According to a paper published by Baidu Research, "LinearDesign, can compute the approximate minimum free energy mRNA sequence for this spike protein in just 11 minutes using beam size b = 1, 000, with only 0.6% loss in free energy change compared to exact search." Baidu later opened both LinearFold and LinearDesign for the medical and scientific research teams around the world to enhance vaccine preparation against the Covid-19 pandemic. Along with these initiatives Baido also released a machine-learning-based biocomputing system called PaddleHelix to facilitate and improve the development of vaccine design, drug discovery, and precision medicine, according to the MIT review.