Silicon Valley Promises AI Will Cure Disease. Drugmaker CEOs Aren't Buying It

AI integrated into a loop with wet labs, like how Anthropic is trying to do (not novel, as other companies trying this too, likely Jeff Dean’s new startup too), does seem very promising.

AI doesn’t have to cure disease to move the needle.

Accelerating bureaucratic work will already help measurable in any big organisation such as pharma.

And that is before any scientific work they are poised to help with.

pton_xd posted and then deleted:

> There is the whole problem of biology, but LLMs do have one advantage over humans: they just do what they are told and aren't subject to optics, politics, profit motive, etc. Maybe that strengh alone will allow them to surface solutions that would've been buried somewhere along the way otherwise.

Oh, absolutely. There are lots of solutions and low hanging fruit in biology for problems like, say, longevity. We have made mice live significantly longer, several dozen times. But it requires human germline genetic engineering to port to humans, and you can bet that "solution" is pretty heavily tabooed.

As for "curing cancer", I suspect that Anthropic or OpenAI will use their high status/reputation to launder the existing solutions (germline, p53, enhanced DNA damage repair pathways, higher tumor-suppressor-to-oncogene copy number, more robust tumor-suppressor networks, more self-anti-cancer apoptosis, CD47 suppression, etc) that society has refused to accept. They might have enough reputation to get people to look at these ideas. It won't cure people with stage 5 turbo-cancer a.k.a the walking dead, but hopefully we won't be moving the goal posts _that_ much on them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329717

I don't see where AI would currently get the data needed to reliably develop new drugs. Or specifically, to develop drugs with a higher success rate than what we're doing now.

The AI would need to be able to predict all effects a specific molecule has on a human. I mean we can do parts of that today, for the specific interactions we already understand. But that would not be fundamentally different and very unlikely to be more effective than current drug development.

There are so many things that digital intelligence could do to advance research and some point will maybe let us run experiments on the cloud given close enough biology simulations etc. But even until then, it could be used to better and faster diagnose people, analyze literature and data from vast sources and chart a "highest chance of curing the person" treatment just like what Gitlabs founder is doing. AI doesn't have to find a cure to disease tomorrow to save more lives.

The average drug trial is 6-7 years. In order to make better drugs, we need labeled outputs of "this worked in a trial" and (more importantly) "this did not work in a trial" (which is almost always excluded today from CROs + pharma companies). And I am using "in order to make better drugs" very loosely here. I am not saying "in order to train a model that will go from disease and person to chemistry that will work". I am saying even to have stastical helpers who can help determine if a drug should be canceled early (which is a huge help) or have its tox dose adjusted or a trial cohort segregated in a different way.

So, yes, AI is not "going to solve 90% of disease in 7 years" (quoted from article), but it's also a little ridiculous to completey shrug off not trying. The way we develop drugs today is the best we have, but it is madness. Our current methods basically equate to (very fancy/stastically rigorous) trial and error. The average drug costs $1-2b to get to market and many many years. We have to at least try to do better. This is an area where it feels like we should feel compelled to out of compassion.

I’ve never really understood the AI can cure disease angle. The AI/ML tools are great at managing complexity, but when it comes to treatment/cures, you have to deal with the complexity anyway. Unless you believe that drug repurposing is the universal rosetta stone for curing disease, and its just a matter of trying all these drugs we have at least run through a safety trial? However, if all these diseases/personalised medicine requires new trials of things, how can that possibly scale (up, and also down to n<10 diseases)?

I don't see AI getting us better drugs faster until we discover how to accurately simulate organs and how molecules interact with them. Such technology seems far away to me.

Unfortunately biology is not deterministic like math is, and won't be for a long time. Although that timeframe could accelerate dramatically if some stay focued on that.

And even when we think we've solved something we will have to go through 8-10 years of clinical trials.

And even if/when we get better at predicting biology, we will still have to go through clinical trials. They might just take not as long, say 4-5 years instead.

Drugmakers don't want cures. They want sick customers who depend on cheap-to-make medications with huge mark-ups that keep customers just barely alive so they can shove every penny they have at drug makers out of desperation.

I don't like AI, but ... how exactly should AI be unable to come up with working solutions in a fully automated lab? The problem set is finite. Either AI can solve things, or it can not, but there really is no objective reasons why AI could not possibly solve xyz, e. g. drugs binding to a molecular receptor - that is a finite problem set. So there must be another explanation here. Either that the quality is lacking, or that some people are anxious of losing money here.

"“That’s complete BS,” said Jeff Leiden, executive chairman of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, recalling a recent conversation with a tech leader who claimed AI would cure 90% of human disease in the next seven years."

This sounds like how people were claiming that AI would never replace writers, coders or designers 3 years ago

Translation ...

"Drugmaker CEOs plan to use AI to 'manage disease' not 'cure' it."

Wouldn't this be like asking the cable company a long time ago whether they thought the internet would pose a risk to their bottom line?

I don't know. I've been leaning toward AI being the more probable source for cures since existing companies in medicine either have no incentive to do it, or can't/won't do it at a pace the world needs. At any rate, I certainly will not take the word of a pharmaceutical CEO.

If there's one thing we have learned about the tech industry, it's that people who have never done a thing but have lots of money know all about the thing, while people with 30 years experience doing the thing obviously know nothing about it because how hard can it be really?

imagine showing up to a different industry ... and saying "we know how to do this "

and everyone's looking at you going "yeah you just walked all the talent out of the room or made it cost more on your own stuff...and now you want to do that for us "

and thinking "Revolutionary" LOLL

Good luck to ai labs if they mean this stuff will cure heart disease or cancer.

Although ai could certainly do more homework with complex care needs vs asking some physician that glances at a chart for 2 minutes and diagnoses someone.

gosh that's a weird phrasing.

"Guy who bullshits about it's product not believe by people who sell, often, bullshit products."

articles like this annoy me a bit (even though I'm sharing it here) because everyone posts it as some kind of "AI is useless" gotcha. It doesnt help that WSJ is paywalled, so as is always the case, pharmaceutical companies are of course using AI fully (and IMO correctly), just not the way OpenAI et al claim it can do the work all on its own:

> Drugmakers are certainly using AI—even to create new drugs. It is helping researchers pick targets, fine-tune experimental medicines and identify which patients would be good candidates for the treatments. Leiden says it is useful as a scientist’s co-pilot.

What is the most impressive / life saving thing AI has achieved so far?

It’s always the thing that gets banded around as support for why ai will be good for us. But the evidence so far is not that strong.

Most diseases are environmental and/or behavioral. The idea a computer can solve all your health issues is as stupid as all the ads for supplements and miracle drugs on late night TV.

Drugmaker CEOs opinions are irrelevant, last month the mathematicians saw it and understood it, what AI is for better and worse, and now scientists are just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It will be a mix of hype and revolution, dismissing the former does not mean being blind to the latter.

update: I really love that within 2 minutes the response to a genuine comment is to downvote/deplatform it, how inimical to rational disagreement and fragile pseudointellectualism our (supposedly STEM) community has become.