Will AI solve medicine?

Artificial intelligence is transforming how we discover and develop new medicines. But how far can it really take us?

In this episode of Hard Drugs, and trace the path of drug development from discovery to testing, manufacturing, and delivery. They explore where AI could speed things up, and where it still hits the limits of biology, data, and economics. They ask what it would take, beyond algorithms, to actually cure and eradicate diseases.

Hard Drugs is a new podcast from Works in Progress and Open Philanthropy about medical innovation presented by Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen.

You can watch or listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

Saloni’s substack newsletter: https://www.scientificdiscovery.dev/

Jacob’s blog: https://blog.jacobtrefethen.com/

Transcript

Saloni Dattani:

Is AI about to cure all diseases? This year, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind, said, “I think one day maybe we can cure all disease with the help of AI. I think that’s within reach, maybe within the next decade or so. I don’t see why not.” Is he right? In this episode, we figured we’d tackle that head on. I’m Saloni Dattani, this is Jacob Trefethen, and we’re presenting the new podcast, Hard Drugs.

Jacob Trefethen:

So far, we’ve talked about what proteins are, how they can be medicines like insulin, how AI can help scientists improve proteins to make even better drugs, and how AI can help design entirely new proteins never seen in nature.

Saloni Dattani:

Now we’ll zoom out to look at the drug development process as a whole, talk about what AI might speed up and where new drugs might still get stuck. This one is necessarily more speculative than usual; we’re going to draw on examples from the past and talk about the possibilities of the future.

Jacob Trefethen:

You can leave the end of the episode with better guesses of whether AI is about to change everything or whether it will be one tool among many that scientists can draw on. Will we cure all disease in 10 years? Let’s get into it.

Saloni Dattani:

I recently read this blog post by , and he says, “We still can’t predict much of anything in biology.” I thought that was kind of interesting because the last two episodes we’ve talked about how AI is being used to improve protein structure prediction and design new proteins. But he basically explains that even though there ...