Re:Ask HN: Could reinforcement learning be used to create va...
by burning_hamster on Thursday March 12, 2020 @11:28AM
(#22557837)
Now that does not mean that one could not think about automated ways of finding vaccine candidates, but instead of modelling (implicitly or explicitly) viruses and vaccines, you would need to model virus-derived particles and human immune responses (plus the effect of adjuvants, etc.).
Re:Ask HN: Could reinforcement learning be used to create va...
by fishbone on Thursday March 12, 2020 @11:57AM
(#22558126)
Good information, so we would have a Neural Net that takes a vaccine input and predicts the human (or animal) immune response, and another neural net that generates the vaccine inputs. I suppose the problem would be lack of labeled training data, which is why I was thinking about the chess example which works by simply knowing the rules of the game.
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.