AI in Neurodegenerative Disease Research: IBM Watson Identifying RNA Binding Proteins

There is truly no known treatment for a devastating neurological disorder called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Several RNA-binding proteins have been implicated in ALS; eleven RBPs have been found to have their mutations causing the familial forms of the disease, and six additional RBPs have been found with abnormal levels or distribution in ALS, although no mutations are known. This has been well realized because, after all, deregulation of RBP is one of the causes adding to the pathobiology of ALS. This is probably because a person’s genome has no less than 1542 RBPs, among them, some that are etiologically connected to ALS. We have used IBM Watson® technology to sift through every RBP in the genome with the aim of finding novel RBPs linked to ALS. Under some conditions, information was elicited by IBM Watson that was not well accessible through the linking of new relationships within entities of interest in works of literature. In this sense, the Watson computer program used its ranking of all RBPs in the whole genome based on their semantic similarity to the known set through aggregating text and applying that knowledge to initiate all RBPs in the whole genome. It therefore follows that they opted to validate the Watson-Top-Ten-ranked receptor-binding proteins at the peptide and RNA levels in ALS cells and non-neurological controlling networks and patient-derived promoted embryonic cell lines. It is possible to build on multiple lines of evidence with the power of IBM Watson in an effort to help in identifying more RBPs that are altered in ALS, hence illustrating the potent ability of AI technologies to speed up scientific research in ALS and potentially other complex neurologic diseases. Artificial intelligence has become one of the largest transformative tools used by scientists in studies of neurodegenerative diseases. Therefore, it provides incomparable capacity in the ability to handle data, analyze, and recognize patterns