New COVID-Like Outbreak 'Matter Of When, Not If,' WHO Director Warns As Scientists Race To Prepare Using Artificial Intelligence

The 2020 COVID-19 outbreak caused massive human suffering, job loss, disruption and financial market panic.

From the Feb. 19, 2020, high to the stock market bottom of the COVID panic in March 2020, the S&P 500 declined about 34%.

World Health Organization Director General Tedros Ghebreyesus is sounding the alarm, warning that "the world is not prepared for a pandemic."

His argument that it's a "matter of when, not if" a new pandemic will strike sounds similar to billionaire Bill Gates's recent public concerns that "we're making the same mistakes again" by failing to adequately prepare.

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No one can be sure what exactly the next pandemic will be caused by. 

"It may be caused by an influenza virus or a new coronavirus or a new pathogen we don't even know about yet — what we call Disease X," Ghebreyesus said.

According to Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security senior scholar Dr. Amesh Adalja, Disease X is a "placeholder concept that refers to a pandemic pathogen that has not yet been characterized."

While multiple companies were able to roll out vaccines at record speed during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers are using breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) to further speed up future vaccine developments against Disease X.

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The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations is providing up to $4.98 million to the Houston Methodist Research Institute to use AI to do just that.

They aim to use the AI to analyze the structures of potential viruses that may be the eventual Disease X and then identify specific parts of their proteins that cause an immune response.

For now, their efforts focus on viruses such as Nipah and Lassa, but regardless, their goal is to get the time to develop a vaccine against a pandemic down to just 100 days.

One public company that's using AI to advance drug discovery is Recursion Pharmaceuticals Inc. RXRX.

Recursion's claimed value add is having its AI-backed drug discovery platform get smarter every time it finds a new drug candidate.

Nvidia Corp. NVDA is one of its believers, having provided an investment in Recursion that saw Recursion's stock skyrocket 116% the day after the news broke.

Regardless of which company's technology comes out on top, it seems more people in the scientific community are embracing AI's potential to fight the next deadly pandemic or even today's current illnesses.

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