SK bioscience, Gates Foundation to launch AI-driven vaccine platform

SK bioscience said Thursday it will lead an artificial intelligence (AI) project funded by the Gates Foundation aimed at speeding up decision-making in vaccine development. The Research Optimization & Trial Outcome Recommender (ROTOR) project will build an AI platform that analyzes clinical and scientific data generated during vaccine development to help researchers decide how to advance a candidate vaccine. Global health nonprofit PATH and consulting firm Slalom will also take part, the company said. In drug development, companies typically decide whether to move into large, costly Phase 3 trials based on Phase 2 results. That decision is harder for many vaccines, including rotavirus vaccines, because scientists often lack a reliable biological marker — a correlate of protection — that predicts whether a vaccine will work, or because lab tests produce inconsistent results. SK bioscience said the AI platform is meant to make that process more scientific and reduce costly guesswork. The platform will initially be built and tested using rotavirus vaccine data from SK bioscience and PAT