3 ms·

One of the main barriers to developing new medicines is that there millions and millions of potential compounds to test. You can go out to your back garden and

One of the main barriers to developing new medicines is that there millions and millions of potential compounds to test. You can go out to your back garden and take a soil sample, it'll have a ton of never before tested compounds, the multiple that by an entire planet worth of samples to test, and it overwhelms human capacity. Testing these happens long before it ever goes to serious trials. Humans are very limited in how many results they can review, but if you can throw them to an AI and have it flag anything promising, then you've overcome a huge bottleneck. This isn't magic or snake oil, and as the data often looks like microscope slides or tables of figures, it's well within the capabilities of current AI models.

andsoitis 2y ago
Not all diseases are cured via compounds. Disease etiology spans both infectious and non-infectious. Infectious diseases are generally cured with antibacterial, antivirals, vaccines (what you call compounds). Non-infectious (genetic, degenerative, metabolic, autoimmune) diseases typically involve therapies beyond “applying a compound”. We’ve seen breakthroughs like surgery (eg removing an appendix or a tumor). Gene therapies such as onasemnogene abeparvovec cures spinal muscular atrophy in infants. Certain leukemias or autoimmune diseases are cured via stem-cell transplants.