The most powerful supercomputer in the United Kingdom is working to change the medical field.

The development of new vaccines and pharmaceuticals is being accomplished by a supercomputer that costs 225 million pounds and employs artificial intelligence (AI).

The Isambard-AI computer, which is located in Bristol, will be the most powerful supercomputer in the United Kingdom when it arrives at its full operational capacity this summer.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer made the announcement on Monday that he intends to “unleash AI” across the United Kingdom in an effort to stimulate the country’s gross domestic product.

It is because of the Isambard-AI that the United Kingdom “truly can be competitive with the world,” as stated by Simon McIntosh-Smith, a professor of high-performance computing at Bristol University.

In an interview with BBC Radio Bristol, Professor McIntosh-Smith stated, “We have actually got a little bit of the system up and running, and we already have people using it to do things like look for new drugs and vaccines to treat people.”

Continuing on, he stated that the group is making use of the computer to develop treatments for a variety of diseases, including heart disease, emphysema, and numerous types of cancer, as well as vaccinations for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.

Melanoma is a type of skin cancer that can affect people of a wide range of skin tones. One group of researchers is even utilizing the technique to greatly boost the number of cases reported of melanoma.

“It can do a lot of the grunt work, a lot of the things that would just be beyond humans because they have so much thinking power and so much computing power,” he stated in his presentation.

Nevertheless, how does the application of artificial intelligence operate to create new medications and vaccinations?

The ability of artificial intelligence models to “simulate how drugs actually work inside the body, at the molecular level right down to atoms and molecules” has been attributed to Professor McKintosh-Smith.

“Many drugs work by targeting certain proteins in the human body and deactivating them or changing the way they behave,” as he explained to me.

A technique that needed “a lot of experience and intelligence,” as well as “educated guessing,” was done by scientists in the past. This procedure required them to figure out how potential medicines would interact with these proteins on their own.

“You can only make so many [guesses],” Professor McKintosh-Smith pointed out, “and physically making things takes time, costs money, and so on, so how that sort of physical experimentation is quite limited.”

According to him, however, a supercomputer such as Isambard AI would change all of this by deploying technology that would provide access to databases containing millions of potential pharmaceuticals. These treatments could then be tested in their early stages online rather than in a laboratory.

Artificial intelligence allows you to zoom in and quickly eliminate hot areas, and there is a lot of variation in how people use it, he said. “Where artificial intelligence comes into it, rather than trying all possible combinations of things, it actually tries a whole bunch of random possibilities, looks at which are most promising, and then hones in on those,” he said. A lot of people use it in different ways.

McKintosh-Smith stated: “We could be saving millions of lives with some of the things that we are talking about here, and I find that tremendously exciting—it is brilliant to be able to actually be doing it right here in Bristol.”

In a speech that was delivered earlier this week, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom declared that artificial intelligence possesses “vast potential” for rejuvenating public services in the United Kingdom. Among the examples he cited were the utilization of technology to evaluate roads for the presence of potholes and to faster diagnose diseases such as cancer.

In response to a question on the substantial investment in Isambard-AI, Professor McIntosh-Smith provided the following response: “The payback is potentially world-changing.”

A comparison was made by Professor McIntosh-Smith between the development of artificial intelligence and the introduction of the internet or the invention of mobile phones. He stated, “One of the advantages of something like Isambard-AI being funded by the government is that all of that work is then done in the public [interest], it is done by academics, and that work is much more open than it might be had it been done in a company.”

The Isambard-AI, which is situated at the National Composites Centre in Emersons Green, is going to be one of the “top ten fastest” supercomputers in the world once it arrives at its full operational capacity.

One of the statements made by Professor McIntosh-Smith was, “We have done things that no one else has done before.”

The rapid development of artificial intelligence in general has given rise to significant concerns regarding the amount of energy that is being consumed, and the operation of supercomputers requires large quantities of energy.

Isambard-AI is not an exception, despite the fact that becoming as efficient as possible is one of its primary goals.

However, Professor McIntosh-Smith stated to the BBC that the waste energy that it generates may have an unanticipated benefit because it results in the production of hot water during the process.

“We are actually looking into using that to heat local homes and businesses,” said Professor McIntosh-Smith. “We are looking into it further.”

“So if you happen to be living near Isambard in the future, we might be able to heat your home with our waste energy.”