HACKER Q&A
📣 fishbone

Could reinforcement learning be used to create vaccines?


My understanding is that reinforcement learning can be used to train neural networks to become chess masters.

Would it be possible to pit a virus generator NN vs a vaccine generator NN to create vaccines? Seems like you could train a NN that could generate a vaccines to combat viruses that we haven’t even seen yet.

  👤 burning_hamster Accepted Answer ✓
Anti-viral vaccines are not anti-viral drugs. The main problem is not figuring out an exploit in the virus biology that could be leveraged by a pharmacological agent to disrupt the viral life cycle. The main problem is

1. finding a part or form of the virus that elicits a strong immune response, which

2. does not cause illness on its own.

Optimization criteria 1. and 2. are in direct conflict with each other as our immune systems are pretty efficient at ignoring stuff that is foreign but not harmful (otherwise you would develop an immune reaction to all kinds of things which we would then call an allergic reaction). So you need to find the right balance, and what that balance is depends on the human response.