Brief
Sydney researcher uses AI to design cancer drug combos and a blood test
Professor Fatemeh Vafaee says AI can prioritize drug combos and help detect recurring breast cancer, with 24 combos validated pre‑clinically.
By Felo News Desk · Published
Professor Fatemeh Vafaee, deputy director of the University of NSW’s AI Institute, said her team is using artificial intelligence to predict drug combinations for cancer treatment and to develop a blood test that rules out recurrent breast cancer.
What happened
Vafaee’s lab has identified 24 synergistic drug combinations, which have been validated in pre‑clinical studies at Melbourne’s Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and are moving to higher‑level testing. Earlier this year the team partnered with a commercial firm to create a blood test aimed at detecting recurrent breast cancer, a condition that affects about 15 % of breast‑cancer patients.
What the reports add
The article notes that traditional drug development succeeds only around 10 % of the time, takes roughly 15 years and costs about $2 billion. AI, according to Vafaee, can evaluate millions of possible drug‑dosage combinations far faster, turning a problem that would require “millions of experiments” into a computational prioritisation task.
What was said
“I’ve become very interested in how we can leverage AI to save lives and improve the patient outcomes,” Vafaee told SMH.
“It’s an intractable problem – if you have 1000 drugs and you want to look into the combination of two or three drugs across different dosages, there are millions of experiments that you need to run,” she said.
“We can predict possible combinations of drugs ahead of lab experiments,” Vafaee added.
How it came about
Vafaee, born in Iran, earned a PhD in AI from the University of Illinois in 2011 and has since applied her expertise to biomedicine. She says AI advances and access to large‑scale data since 2022 – the year ChatGPT launched – enable scientists to work “several thousand times faster.” The University of NSW will feature these advances in its forthcoming Social Impact of Science report, due Monday.
Key facts
- Professor Fatemeh Vafaee leads AI‑driven drug‑combination research at the University of NSW. (smh.com.au)
- The lab has identified 24 synergistic drug combinations validated at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. (smh.com.au)
- A new blood test to rule out recurrent breast cancer was co‑developed earlier this year. (smh.com.au)
- Traditional drug development succeeds about 10 % of the time, takes 15 years and costs $2 billion. (smh.com.au)
- AI allows scientists to evaluate millions of drug‑dosage combinations far faster than lab experiments. (smh.com.au)
Sources
- [1] smh.com.au — originally reported as “AI in medicine: Expert believes new technology can help fight cancer”
