October 28, 2024

 

Philippine university taps into AI to support studies on ASF vaccines

 

 

 

The University of the Philippines (UP) is harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to help improve studies on vaccines against African swine fever (ASF).

 

"By equipping policymakers, farmers, and environmentalists with AI-driven tools, UP is helping to build a more resilient and sustainable food system for the Philippines," UP said in a statement on October 24.

 

Homer Pantua, president of biotechnology firm BioAssets Corp., said machine learning, a subfield of AI, can boost the ability to study viruses such as ASF to prevent the spread of viral diseases or outbreaks.

 

He said machine learning enables the analysis of the evolution of ASF, which has dramatically reduced the Philippine' hog population since the first outbreak in 2019, thus jacking up pork prices.

 

"We propose that machine learning-guided applications can help support vaccine research and also help in making careful analyses of the virus' origin and evolution," said Pantua, also an adjunct faculty of the UP Los Baños' Institute of Biological Sciences, during the AI Horizons PH '24: Conference on AI-Powered Research and Innovation held in Taguig City.

 

"From a vaccine development-centric point of view, we can use machine learning to generate data that will guide in identifying some vaccine candidate," he added.

 

Aside from the absence of widely accepted, safe and effective vaccines, Pantua identified other gaps in the ASF research: optimised and harmonised protocols for sample collection, whole genome sequences (the process of determining the complete DNA sequence of an organism) for further studies and discovery and evolutionary analyses.

 

- Inquirer