Also in today’s edition: The latest in the pilot talks and a big fall preview
Good morning. When it comes to revolutionizing drug discovery, AI hasn’t remotely lived up to the hype – more on that below, along with Jagmeet Singh ’s plan for the carbon tax and The Globe ’s gigantic fall cultural preview. But first:Among the many promises of AI – that it will drive our cars, solve our cold cases, manage our money, write our newsletters – one of the most auspicious is its potential to keep us healthy. Making new drugs from scratch is a wildly time-consuming process.
But by ditching fruitless molecules and predicting how better ones function in our bodies, AI is meant to speed drug discovery up and bring costs way down. Exciting! And also – as my colleagues Joe Castaldo and Sean Silcoff found – entirely unproven so far. In theirCompanies relying on AI to help with development, like Canadian biotech darling Deep Genomics, have suffered serious setbacks.
But wait, you ask – could this be a job for generative AI, which can be used for a whole range of tasks, even ones it wasn’t specifically trained to do? Great call, and exactly what Deep Genomics is now hoping. Last fall, the company announced a sort of ChatGPT for biology called BigRNA. A researcher feeds it a DNA or RNA sequence, and the AI system predicts, for example, which changes in DNA affect the production of a crucial protein and which ones switch on a gene at the wrong place or time.
Will this lead to better, faster, cheaper AI-designed drugs? Right now, it’s hard to say. Ideally, the dot-connecting revealsa drug is well-poised to work in humans, so researchers aren’t just throwing molecules at a wall. But whether Big Tech will finally make good on its promise to revolutionize health care – well, no AI system in the world can predict that yet.
Noastack Newnewsletter Drug Protein Molecule Dna Globe Trial Failure Data Big Tech Jagmeet Singh NDP
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