UVA researchers develop AI tool to advance modern healthcare

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WRIC) -- Scientists at the University of Virginia (UVA) are breaking barriers in the world of Artificial Intelligence and healthcare.

8News spoke with a leader behind the research, Dr. Jeff Saucerman.

"We're trying to combine scientific knowledge with AI," he explained.

Saucerman said heart failure kills more than 400,000 Americans each year and that this impact is expected to increase by 40% over the next six to eight years. The biomedical engineering expert and his team at the UVA are now working to find ways to fight the vicious killer. However, they're doing so through an innovative, modernized channel.

"Discovering drugs is incredibly difficult," Saucerman said. "Most drugs fail when going through clinical trials."

Now, some experts are asking, "Why not use what we already have?" That's exactly what Saucerman's team is doing.

"What we're finding is that you can identify existing drugs that are already known to be safe and already shown to work really well in your brain," Saucerman said. "For example, [drugs] that [have] potential to be repurposed for the heart."

His team developed an innovative model, LogiRx, which takes everything we know about how cells work and combines that with cause-and-effect AI tools and uses that information to detect patterns to see how certain drugs can have helpful effects beyond their initial purpose.

Saucerman used "Lexapro" as an example.

"[Lexapro is] prescribed to like 30 million Americans for anxiety, depression," Saucerman began. "We're finding [the drug] actually has promise on these heart muscle cells and preventing their growth."

This essentially means that there is reason to believe that one day, a drug like Lexapro could have the potential to tackle heart disease and cardiovascular concerns rather than just brain conditions.

Saucerman told 8News that this research goes back at least eight years and the work is not done yet. He said the research will continue to grow and expand and has the potential to do so in all sorts of directions -- like seeing how it could apply to other drugs and conditions in the longterm.

Saucerman thanked the National Institute of Health for its support and said this work would not be possible without it.