But by far the most important application of AI to medicine in 2020 was the key role it played in designing safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in record time. On January 11, 2020, Chinese authorities released the virus’s genetic sequence.[11] Moderna scientists got to work with powerful machine-learning tools that analyzed what vaccine would work best against it, and just two days later they had created the sequence for its mRNA vaccine.[12] On February 7 the first clinical batch was produced.
