The Chief Medical Officer and Director of Global Healthcare and Non-profits at Amazon Web Services, Dr Rowland Illing, has said that the immense computational capacity of the cloud, along with the accelerating capabilities of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, is offering new hope in the speedy diagnosis and improved treatment of Parkinson’s disease.
Illing, who made this known in a press statement issued on Saturday, noted that up to 15 per cent of Parkinson’s cases can currently be linked to deletions or mutations in people’s genes.
According to the World Health Organisation, PD is a brain condition that causes problems with movement, mental health, sleep, pain, and other health issues.
PD worsens over time and has no cure, but therapies and medicines can reduce symptoms. Common symptoms include tremors, painful muscle contractions, and difficulty speaking.
“When the British surgeon James Parkinson first described ‘shaking palsy’ in 1817, he did so by observing the way patients’ bodies moved. Two centuries on, most specialists still rely on physical symptoms to diagnose Parkinson’s disease. In other words, they are operating largely in the dark.
“This lack of understanding contributes significantly to the growing health burden of Parkinson’s, with over 10 million people living with the disease and incidence doubling every 25 years, according to the World Health Organisation.
“However, the immense computational capacity of the cloud and the accelerating capabilities of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are offering new hope. By transforming our understanding of the brain and how Parkinson’s impacts it, they can speed up diagnosis, develop new treatments, and better empower patients themselves,” the expert stated.
He explained that PD is a progressive disease caused by the loss of dopamine-producing neurons in the brain, and the condition worsens over time.
He noted that because the brain relies on dopamine for motor control, it leads to physical symptoms such as stiffness, decreased arm movement, reduced blinking or facial expression, and involuntary shaking or tremors when the body is at rest.
He added that it can also cause less obvious symptoms such as low blood pressure, cognitive impairment, depression, anxiety, hallucinations, and delusions, as research shows that people with Parkinson’s are more likely to develop some forms of dementia, further broadening the impact of the disease.
“Because researchers don’t know what causes patients’ dopamine-producing neurons to begin shutting down, they are unable to treat the root cause. Instead, most treatments have focused on replacing the lost dopamine. This can temporarily restore motor function, but it cannot stop the progression of the disease. It also makes misdiagnosis a serious issue, as treatments that boost dopamine and help with Parkinson’s symptoms can worsen those of similar neurological conditions such as dementia or essential tremor.
“Finding a genuine cure for Parkinson’s involves collecting and analysing a vast amount of varied data and using a much deeper and more detailed understanding of the brain to enable new forms of treatment.
“Up to 15 per cent of Parkinson’s cases can currently be linked to deletions or mutations in people’s genes. The more DNA data that researchers have to work with, the more of these links they may discover, revealing genetic markers that can help warn of susceptibility to the condition. These enable earlier diagnosis and can point the way to treatments,” he stated.
He further said that the California-based company, Ultima Genomics, has developed software and algorithms and trained its AI models on AWS for its next-generation DNA sequencer.
He also noted that the scalable architecture reduces the cost of sequencing an entire human genome from roughly $1,000 to just $100, which can help broaden genetic understanding of the disease and enable the development of gene therapy treatments that can edit DNA to prevent it.
“Proteins aren’t the only potential biomarkers for Parkinson’s being investigated with the help of cloud data analysis and AI. Icometrix is using AI imaging solutions to monitor changes in brain tissue volume and explore how these correlate with the progression of the disease. Rebuilding its Deep Learning (inference) pipeline using AWS infrastructure has enabled Icometrix to significantly improve accuracy while reducing computation time.
“Connecting changes in the brain to changes in people’s experiences will represent a huge advance in understanding Parkinson’s. However, much of what takes place within the brain remains invisible – even to MRI scans.
Mapping changes in the 200 billion cells the brain contains is one of the objectives of the Brain Knowledge Platform, a major new initiative led by the Allen Institute, which is building the world’s largest open-source database of brain cell data on AWS.
“Combining high-performance AWS computing services with AI and Machine Learning services, such as Amazon SageMaker, enables the Brain Knowledge Platform to decode the characteristics of different brain cell types and monitor what happens to them as neurological diseases progress,” the statement added.
“Through the Brain Knowledge Platform, we’re beginning to aggregate information about the properties of vulnerable cell populations in Alzheimer’s disease – what they look like, how they function, and what the consequence of their loss may be in disease,” the Senior Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Ed Lein, explained. “You can imagine that these cells now become targets for therapies to prevent their degeneration. An increasingly rich understanding of these cells will guide new treatments. This same approach will work for any brain disease.”
It added that through AWS, the Brain Knowledge Platform will become an open registry of neurological data, available to doctors and researchers worldwide.
“Precise mapping of a patient’s brain can enable a wider range of treatments, beyond pharmaceutical approaches. Deep Brain Stimulation electrically stimulates carefully selected areas of the brain in order to treat neurological movement disorders.
“AI and the cloud can help to make this treatment option accessible to more patients by making treatment more precise and less invasive while reducing side effects. This includes using AI to adjust stimulation therapy to each patient’s brain activity.
“Rolling back the burden of Parkinson’s and improving the lives of those living with the condition involves approaching the challenge from a number of different directions simultaneously,” he concluded.
