AI has already disrupted fields like coding, investment banking and law, but it looks to be poised to change yet another field — medicine.
Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis says that AI-created medicines will be available by the end of this year. Google DeepMind has a track record of working in biomedical research, having created the Alpha Fold program that discovered the protein folding structure of all known proteins. The discovery had led to Demis Hassabis being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year.
“Over two and a half million researchers around the world use (Alpha Fold), he said in an interview. “We folded all proteins known to science, or 200 million proteins. It would (have taken) five years on average to do that experimentally. The rule of thumb is that it takes a PhD student their entire PhD to find the structure of one protein (which takes around five years). So 200 million would have taken a billion years of PhD time. And we’ve just given that all to the world for free. You know, all open for anyone to use. I call it science of digital speed,” he said.
Hassabis suggested that this pace of discovery could now be applied more generally to medicine. “I think we’re going to see more of (such) digital technologies. And I think that can start happening with scientific breakthroughs and help with things like medicine and health. And we’re looking at very big therapeutic areas — we’re kind of agnostic to which area, because these tools are very general. They could apply to any type of disease area, but we are looking at oncology, cardiovascular, neuro degeneration and all the big disease areas. And I think by the end of this year, we’ll have our first drugs in the clinic,” he added.
Hassabis seemed to be suggesting that AI was progressing so quickly that it could very soon start helping researchers discover new medicines. Like Alpha Fold had generated a billion years of PhD output after a few years of development, other AI approaches could also produce vast amounts of new research which would’ve otherwise taken decades. This would accelerate drug discovery, and unveil new treatments and cures. Hassabis isn’t the only AI researcher who’s said this — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that AI could accelerate a century’s worth of progress in 5-10 years. And if that does end up happening, futuristic cures, medicines and previously unthought-of treatments for the most serious diseases could be right around the corner for humanity.