AI is already changing how humans work, but it can also offer unprecedented access into understanding their own bodies.
In a recent interview, Patrick Collison, the CEO of financial technology giant Stripe, offered a compelling vision for the future of medicine, driven by the power of artificial intelligence. Known for his deep interest in accelerating scientific progress, Collison is also a co-founder of the Arc Institute, a non-profit research organization. His remarks shed light on a new frontier in the battle against humanity’s most persistent and complex diseases.
Collison began by highlighting a stark reality in the medical world. “Humanity has never cured a complex disease,” he stated. “This includes most cancers, most cardiovascular disease, most neurodegenerative disease, and most autoimmune diseases. We’ve never cured one of these.” This challenge was the impetus for creating the Arc Institute, which he said was founded “with the idea of trying a different strategy to go after these complex diseases.”
A significant part of that new strategy, Collison revealed, is artificial intelligence. While many associate AI with the productivity gains of Large Language Models (LLMs), he pointed to another, more fundamental language that AI is beginning to decipher. “There’s another language: DNA, the language of life,” he explained. “It’s billions of base pairs, and at a human level, we can’t understand what’s going on there. It’s beyond what any individual can comprehend.”
The key to unlocking this biological language, according to Collison, is the creation of a “virtual cell.” He announced that the Arc Institute had just published its first such model, a significant milestone. “The idea behind a virtual cell is to have a useful,accurate way to perform computational experiments,” Collison said. “You can test your hypothesis ‘in silico,’ as biologists say… If that was accurate, it would be an enormous accelerant.” These in silico, or computational, experiments could allow scientists to test therapies and understand disease progression with a speed and scale previously unimaginable.
This breakthrough is not the result of AI alone, but the convergence of three powerful technologies over the last few years. “We now have the ability to sequence individual cells and figure out what’s going on in just one cell, which is a big deal,” he noted. “We’ve also gotten deep neural networks and transformers, which allow us to process data of very significant complexity. And then we’ve had huge advances in functional genomics and CRISPR, giving us the ability to make individual edits to individual cells.”
Collison emphasized that the true potential lies in their synergy. “These are all big breakthroughs in their own right, but when you put them together, there’s this shimmering potential promise that for the first time, you could enable these accurate computational predictions very quickly and very cheaply. And if that worked, it would be a huge deal in biology.”
Collison isn’t the only tech leader who has talked about the significant impact AI could have on biology. Google Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis has said that AI could give humans a crack at curing all diseases in a decade. He’s also talked about the same virtual cells that Patrick Collison describes. Meanwhile, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have said that AI can do a century’s worth of scientific research in years. It remains to be seen how these predictions play out, but the biggest gains from AI might not come in software or productivity, but in medicine and health.