AI Could Help Prepare For The Next Pandemic

Uploaded on 2025-03-04 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Artificial Intelligence, FREE TO VIEW, BUSINESS-Services-Health & Welfare

A major new international study has outlined the potential for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve our ability to prepare and react to future global pandemics. This comes as infectious disease threats to individual and public health are numerous, varied and frequently unexpected.

AI is already being widely used to support human decision making in economics, medical and scientific research, and has the potential to transform the scope and power of infectious disease epidemiology.

In the first study of this kind, he University of Oxford's Pandemic Sciences Institute (PSI) along with other research partner describe how they think that AI can transform infectious disease research and save lives. The study, published in Nature, outlines how advances in AI can accelerate breakthroughs in infectious disease research and outbreak response.

The PSI study coincides with the recent AI Action Summit in Paris, which failed to reach international agreement on AI investment and regulation.

Calling for a collaborative and transparent environment, both in terms of datasets and AI models, the study is a partnership between scientists from the University of Oxford and colleagues from academia, industry and policy organisations across Africa, America, Asia, Australia and Europe.

So far, medical applications of AI have predominantly focused on individual patient care, enhancing for example clinical diagnostics, precision medicine, or supporting clinical treatment decisions. However, the PSI study finds that recent advances in AI methodologies are performing increasingly well even with limited data, a major bottleneck to date. Better performance on incomplete data is opening new areas for AI tools to improve health around the world.

The PSI's Professor Moritz Kraemer said 'In the next five years, AI has the potential to transform pandemic preparedness... It will help us better anticipate where outbreaks will start and predict their trajectory, using terabytes of routinely collected climatic and socio-economic data. It might also help predict the impact of disease outbreaks on individual patients by studying the interactions between the immune system and emerging pathogens...

'Taken together, and if integrated into countries’ pandemic response systems, these advances will have the potential to save lives and ensure the world is better prepared for future pandemic threats.'

However, not all areas of pandemic preparedness and response will benefit from advances in AI. For example, whereas protein language models hold great promise for speeding up understanding of how virus mutations can impact disease spread and severity, advances in foundational models might only provide modest improvements over existing approaches to modelling the speed at which a pathogen is spreading.

The PSI study is cautious in suggesting that AI alone will solve infectious disease challenges, but that integration of human feedback into AI modelling workflows might help overcome existing limitations.

Indeed, the authors have reservations about the quality of training data used to develop the AI model, as well as the potential risks associated with the deployment of 'black-box; models for decision making.

Nature | University of Oxford | Pandemic Sciences Institute | Oxford Martin School |

University of Oxford | The Engineer

Image: Unsplash

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