Could Omicron have been predicted? First-of-its-kind technology possibly foresees variants
Global News
University of Waterloo researchers believe their technology can predict highly possible COVID-19 variants before they even arrive.
From a fake movie poster allegedly predicting its arrival in the 1960s to a hoax Simpsons episode foreshadowing widespread panic, there’s been no shortage of speculation that the onset of the Omicron COVID-19 variant was foreseen way before its arrival.
But while all of those examples have been downgraded to being just plain misinformation, questions do still remain about whether we could have actually seen Omicron coming.
Health officials have long been warning that the coronavirus, and other viruses, mutates as it replicates and infects new hosts – but could they possibly predict what a variant will look like, and how it will behave, way before the virus even mutates?
A team of researchers at the University of Waterloo believe they’ve come up with a technology that could come pretty close.
“It has been shown by us and other researchers that artificial intelligence and text mining algorithms can be used to model genetic codes and predict virus mutations,” said Mohammad Kohandel, lead of the Mathematical Modelling and Biology Lab at the University of Waterloo, and a pioneer on this project alongside Amir Hossein Darooneh and Michelle Przedborski.
The team believes its technology is the first of its kind in the country.
Their secret? Machine learning and genomes — the building block sequence for the virus.
As a virus is copying itself, it will accidentally make “copying errors” or mistakes in the genome sequence, resulting in a mutation. A variant could have one or many mutations within its sequence.