[ti:Robot Scientist Helps Design New Drugs] [ar:Jonathan Evans] [al:Science In The News] [by:www.51voa.com] [00:00.00]Robots are common in today's world. [00:03.46]They manufacture cars, work in space, explore oceans, [00:08.89]clean up oil spills and investigate dangerous environments. [00:14.36]And now, scientists at the University of Manchester [00:19.22]are using a robot as a laboratory partner. [00:22.88]The researchers at the university created the robot in 2009 [00:28.19]and named it Adam. [00:29.97]Despite the name, Adam is not a humanoid robot. [00:35.07]It is about the size of a car. [00:37.98]Adam was built to do science and make discoveries. [00:42.68]Ross King is the leader of the University of Manchester research team. [00:48.05]He says the robot made a discovery about yeast, [00:52.46]a kind of fungus used in science as a model for human cells. [00:57.93]"Adam hypothesized certain functions of genes [01:01.62]within yeast and experimentally tested these hypothesizes and confirmed them. [01:06.83]So it both hypothesized and confirmed new scientific knowledge." [01:11.96]Adam's success as a scientist led to the creation [01:16.78]of another robot scientist named Eve. [01:19.42]Researchers developed Eve to design and test drugs [01:24.23]for tropical and neglected diseases. [01:27.47]These diseases kill and infect millions of people each year. [01:32.59]Drug development is slow and costly. [01:36.60]Experts say it can take more than 10 years [01:40.49]and about $1 billion to discover and develop new medicines. [01:46.38]Drug manufacturers are unlikely to get their investment money back. [01:52.30]So the University of Manchester developed a low-cost test [01:58.61]that shows whether or not a chemical [02:01.03]is likely to be made into an effective medicine. [02:04.64]Mr. King says that other drug testing methods were not very effective. [02:10.61]"How it works conventionally is you use robotics as well [02:14.40]and you have a large collection of possible drugs. [02:17.43]You test every single compound. [02:19.30]And you start at the beginning of your library [02:21.12]and continue until the end, and stop. [02:22.57]So it's not a very intelligent process. [02:24.54]The robotics doesn't learn anything as it goes along, [02:27.95]even if it's tested a million compounds, [02:30.32]it still doesn't have any expectation [02:32.06]of what will happen next when it tests a new compound." [02:33.88]Mr. King says that Eve is different [02:37.38]because the robot learns as it tests different compounds. [02:41.57]He says the robot is designed to ignore compounds [02:46.10]that it thinks unlikely to be good. [02:48.81]It will only test the compounds which have a good chance of working. [02:54.23]Eve has discovered that a compound known [02:57.57]to be effective against cancer might also be used [03:01.46]to fight against malaria and other tropical diseases. [03:05.93]Mr. King says he hopes to completely automate the drug testing process [03:12.22]with robots like Eve to create and test new chemicals. [03:17.26]But he says humans remain in control of the manufacturing process. [03:23.24]I'm Jonathan Evans. [03:25.51]¸ü¶àÌýÁ¦Çë·ÃÎÊ51voa.com