Google’s Artificial Intelligence firm speeds up discovering genetic predisposition to diseases

Google’s Artificial Intelligence firm Deep Mind is speeding up finding out genetic predisposition to diseases.

Google’s Artificial Intelligence firm is speeding up the hunt for genetic predisposition to certain diseases.

Researchers at DeepMind say they have found 89 percent of all vital mutations that led to conditions and increase the speed of diagnosis and respected scientists called their work a “big step forward”.

Professor Ewan Birney, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, told BBC News: “It will help clinical researchers prioritise where to look to find areas that could cause disease.”

The method involves looking at the order of the human DNA’s makeup and seeing if the blocks of chemicals – which are known as adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine – are in the correct order, and see if this is because the person inherited a disorder that can cause diseases.

The company’s system, which has been dubbed AlphaMissense, claims to be able to decipher if the letters in the DNA will make the right formation. If it does not, it is marked as a possible disease-causing gene.

At the moment, knowledge of what human genes can cause disease is quite limited, standing at 0.1 per cent but this has led to a significant increase and room to explore treatments and other developments.

Pushmeet Kohli, who works at the AI company, said: ”Researchers can now focus their efforts on the new areas, that they were not aware of and we have highlighted as potentially disease-causing.

“The new tool is really bringing a new perspective to the data. It will help clinical scientists make sense of genetic data so that it is useful for patients and for their clinical teams.”