With the technological progress of deep learning, artificial intelligence plays an increasingly important role in new drug research and development. Recently, the international research team participated by Chinese scholars used artificial intelligence to discover the potential therapeutic target of "frostbite", which provides a new idea for the treatment of this disease. The medical name of "frostbite" is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It is a neurodegenerative disease that affects motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord, causing the death of motor neurons and making the brain unable to control muscle movement. The main clinical manifestation is muscle atrophy and weakness, and the patient will eventually die of respiratory failure. At present, the treatment principle of "frostbite" is mainly to reduce symptoms, and the drugs approved for the treatment of "frostbite" can hardly reverse any neurodegenerative symptoms of patients. In the research of AI drug research and development company silicon intelligence, Johns Hopkins University School of medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital Affiliated to Harvard University, Tsinghua University in China and other institutions, researchers used the AI biological target discovery platform called "pandaomics" to analyze a large number of transcriptome data of central nervous system samples from multiple public data sets, And the transcriptome and proteome data of a large number of motor neuron samples from patients with "frostbite". AI identified 17 high confidence targets and 11 new treatment targets by analyzing these big data related to the progress of "frostbite" disease. The researchers then verified it in the Drosophila model simulating the situation of "frostbite" patients, and confirmed that 18 of the above 28 targets can alleviate neurodegenerative symptoms. Relevant papers have been published in the international journal frontiers of aging neuroscience recently. One of the authors Lu Bai, a professor at the school of pharmacy of Tsinghua University, said in an interview with Xinhua News Agency: "From the discovery of targets in massive data sets driven by artificial intelligence, to biological validation in mice, fruit flies and other model systems, and then to rapid clinical testing through experiments initiated by researchers, this represents a new trend, which is expected to greatly reduce the cost and time of drug development. More importantly, the improvement of the success rate, especially for neurodegenerative diseases." (Xinhua News Agency)