That is good news for ALS patients seeking better treatment options. Famous sufferers include Lou Gehrig, the 1923-39 New York Yankees baseball player; actor and playwright Sam Shepard, who died last month; and Hawking, a rare example of someone living for decades with the condition.
If the research goes on to deliver new medicines, it would mark a notable victory for AI in drug discovery, bolstering the prospects of a growing batch of start-up companies focused on the technology.
Those firms are based on the premise that while AI robots won't replace scientists and clinicians, they should save time and money by finding drug leads several times faster than conventional processes.
British 'Unicorn'
Mead from Sheffield is working with BenevolentAI, one of a handful of British "unicorns" -- private companies with a market value above $1 billion, in this case $1.7 billion -- which is rapidly expanding operations at its offices in central London.
Others in the field include Scotland's Exscientia and U.S.-based firms Berg, Numerate, twoXAR, Atomwise and InSilico Medicine -- the last of which recently launched a drug discovery platform geared specifically to ALS.
"What we are trying to do is find relationships that will give us new targets in disease," said Jackie Hunter, a former drug hunter at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) who now heads Benevolent's pharma business.
"We can do things so much more dynamically and be really responsive to what essentially the information is telling us."
Unlike humans, who may have pet theories, AI scans through data and generates hypotheses in an unbiased way.
Conventional drug discovery remains a hit-and-miss affair and Hunter believes the 50 percent failure rates seen for experimental compounds in mid- and late-stage clinical trials due to lack of efficacy is unsustainable, forcing a shift to AI.