The hype about Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere, so it is no surprise that AI is referenced with respect to malaria research. In MalariaWorld this week there is a link to a blog post ‘Can AI Democratize the Global Fight Against Malaria?’ in Health Policy Watch. The post is a conversation with Jeremy Burrows, Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) vice president, and the focus of the post is on drug discovery. Burrows explains how a new open-access, AI-powered drug discovery tool co-developed by MMV aims to level the playing field.
Burrows states that in the early stages of drug discovery AI can play a major role in terms of helping to identify new starting points, optimize these molecules toward candidate drugs, and then actually profile these compounds to ultimately be the medicines of the future. They modelled data and created an open-access machine learning model malaria inhibitor prediction platform (MAIP), available for free. Anyone can go there, enter a virtual chemical structure, and receive a prediction of whether that compound is likely to be active against malaria.
MMV is working with the Gates Foundation and a London-based company called deepmirror to deliver a tool called Drug Design for Global Health (referred to as dd4gh). This tool will be delivered in March 2026 and will be available for free only for scientists working in global health. He states that the dd4gh model is democratizing AI for scientists in lower- and middle-income countries to fight malaria (dd4gh learning loop in figure). African scientists will be able to access the tool.
Burrows also states that the future of AI is promising but requires a healthy degree of scepticism. While there are many bold claims, it’s essential to validate new models and understand their limits. Human oversight remains critical. AI should be used as a tool to enhance, not replace, human judgment.
On this point I agree. More critical human oversight of the supposed effects of malaria drugs, and indeed the causes of malaria, is needed. AI is only based on the inputs (garbage in, garbage out?) and if the inputs are that drugs are effective against malaria, as they would be from an organisation such as MMV, the outputs are going to be the same.