AI Used to Advance Drug Delivery System for Glaucoma and Other Chronic Diseases
Researchers from Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins Medicine say they have used artificial intelligence models and machine-learning algorithms to successfully predict which components of amino acids that make up therapeutic proteins are most likely to safely deliver therapeutic drugs to animal eye cells.
"The project, a collaboration with researchers from the University of Maryland, holds promise for advancing new and more tolerable drug treatments for common chronic blinding eye diseases, including glaucoma and macular degeneration, which affect 3 million and about 20 million people in the United States, respectively," according to a Johns Hopkins news release.
Published May 2 in Nature Communications, the new research showed that artificial intelligence-designed models accurately predicted an effective sequence of amino acids, also known as peptides or small proteins, that would bind to a particular chemical in rabbit eye cells and safely dispense medications over several weeks, reducing the need for frequent, strict treatment schedules. The team specifically investigated peptides that bind to melanin, a compound that provides color to the eye but has the advantage of being widely present throughout specialized structures in eye cells.