FOCUS ON – MEDICAL A.I.
4 WAYS AI & TECH ARE TRANSFORMING HEALTHCARE AI and tech are increasingly being adopted by a sector that people place their trust in every day – healthcare. From bespoke medical implants to wearable tech, to cancer treatment, to drug discovery, the applications for artificial intelligence in the sector are growing fast. Here, we look at some of the main developments that AI has brought to healthcare over the past few months and years. by Steven Gislam
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hen former Google employee Blake Lemoine recently made claims that the tech giant was secretly harbouring an artificial intelligence that was showing signs of being self-aware, half the world ignored the claims, brushing them off as the bitterness of a disgruntled employee, the other half took to the conspiracy forums. Whether or not Lemoine’s claims are true – and if they are (big if) then it’s truly groundbreaking – what it does show is that AI has not yet won full public trust. Not surprising considering the number of cautionary tales that Hollywood has produced over the years. Nevertheless, AI is increasingly being adopted by a sector that people place their trust in every day – healthcare. From bespoke medical implants to wearable tech, to cancer treatment, to drug discovery, the applications for artificial intelligence in the sector are growing fast. Here, we look at some of the main developments that AI has brought to healthcare over the past few months and years.
Drug discovery Traditionally, drug discovery and the process of bringing it to market is a lengthy process, 8 Industry Europe
often taking more than a decade and at an average cost of $2.6 billion per medicine according to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. AI is able to study chemicals in ways that humans simply cannot, automatically predicting complex protein structures and designing new drugs, despite actually having no real scientific understanding. The tech also has the power to democratise drug design, as it is no longer limited to the major pharmaceutical companies. With the right algorithms, startups can invent thousands of new molecules in just a few hours. Using machine learning, parts of the design process are being automated, helping scientists develop new drugs for notoriously difficult diseases such as cancer, HIV/AIDS and Alzheimer’s, as well as rare genetic conditions. In April 2021, Oxford-based Exscientia began Phase I trials using its experimental Alzheimer’s treatment, becoming the first company to use an AI-designed molecule in human trials. The following month, the company entered into an agreement – potentially worth over $1.2 billion – with New York-based pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb to accelerate
drug discovery in a number of therapeutic areas including immunology and oncology. The same month it also announced its AI had discovered two more molecules, which are also undergoing trials In November of the same year, Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. decided to get in on the act and launched Isomorphic Labs, a new artificial intelligence company specialising in the discovery of new drugs. The company leverages technology developed by its sister company DeepMind to, in its own words “accelerate drug discovery, and ultimately, find cures for some of humanity’s most devastating diseases". DeepMind made waves last year when it revealed how its AlphaFold2 technology can be used to predict the shape of each and every protein in the human body with neartotal accuracy. All of the AI-developed potential drugs are, however, still in the earliest stages of human trials, and it will take some years to ascertain whether they work or not, while medical regulators have yet to approve an AI-designed drug, at the time of writing. Nonetheless, pharmaceutical investors are putting billions of dollars into AI and machine learning-based research in recent
