Study delivered by experts from universities in Glasgow and Sydney claims to have made ‘never seen before’ discoveries that could help better understand the spread of disease and develop vaccines

Artificial intelligence-powered software has revealed “never-seen-before” viral mechanisms, which could help to boost the UK’s future pandemic preparedness, researchers claim.

Scientists from Glasgow University have used artificial intelligence to try and uncover mechanisms that can explain how viruses enter and replicate across the human body. it is claimed that the findings hold “immediate fundamental insights” and could “pave the way for vaccine development”.

In collaboration with the University of Sydney, the team used AI protein structure prediction to examine hundreds of species in the Flaviviridae, a large family of viruses that causes diseases such as Dengue and Hepatitis C.

The AI technology, developed by Google Deep Mind and Meta, allowed researchers to find and classify the entry proteins of all the viruses tested – something which traditional methods cannot do.

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This study is the first to demonstrate that Hepatitis C – suffered by 39,000 in Scotland – has a completely novel entry mechanism, unlike other viruses.

It is also understood that the findings could help tackle current viral threats such as Mpox, which the World Health Organisation declared a public health emergency of international concern las month.

Dr Joe Grove, lecturer at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, said: “By discovering more about the entry proteins on the outside of viruses, as we’ve done, we can better understand the fundamentals of viral biology, which in turn can guide development of drugs or vaccines.”

“Going forward we want to use this technology to scale up our research to thousands of viruses. By doing this we can build foundational knowledge to inform our responses to existing and new viral diseases,” Grove added.

The study has been published in the medical journal Nature.

A version of this story originally appeared on PublicTechnology sister publication Holyrood