These AI Breakthroughs Mean Medicine Will Never Be the Same Again

“Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated.”

That’s Lee Sedol, a 9-dan rank master of the strategy game Go, after he lost to AlphaGo.

It’s the AI system Google’s DeepMind AI division created.

Go is a 4,500-year-old Chinese strategy game played on a 19×19 board with black and white stones.

And it makes chess look like child’s play.

The number of board positions in Go is greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe.

Due to its complexity… and its reputation for requiring high levels of creativity to master… most AI researchers believed a computer could never beat the world’s best human Go players.

That remained the view until Lee – one of the strongest players in the history of the game – lost a tournament against AlphaGo in a bruising 4-1 defeat.

And the folks at DeepMind didn’t stop at board games.

They followed their AlphaGo victory by going in a new direction – medical research.

And as you’ll see today, it’s leading to a profound shift in healthcare.

Instead of treating diseases after symptoms start to show, thanks to AI, doctors will be able to prevent diseases before they take hold.

Drug Discovery Breakthrough

DeepMind’s next AI was AlphaFold.

It uses the same deep-learning techniques as AlphaGo. But its mission is to solve one of the hardest problems in biology – the protein-folding problem.

It may sound obscure. But it couldn’t be more important for making real breakthroughs in medicine.

Predicting the 3D shapes of proteins is essential for drug and vaccine development. Misfolded proteins lead to diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Unfortunately for human researchers, the number of possible shapes a protein can fold into is larger even than the number of possible board configurations in a game of Go.

It typically takes a PhD candidate the full length of a four- to five-year PhD program to figure out the 3D shape of a single protein.

In about 50 years of human endeavor from all the labs around the world, we’ve managed to find the shape of only about 100,000 proteins.

That may sound like a lot. But it’s just 0.05% of the 200 million proteins known to science.

But thanks to its superhuman powers, AlphaFold can fold an average-length protein in seconds.

This allowed it, in 2021, to fold all 200 million proteins in a year.

DeepMind shared its findings with researchers from all over the world. They’re now using it in all sorts of interesting ways. For example, to…

• Create a novel malaria vaccine that focuses on curbing transmission of the disease.

• Combat antibiotic resistance.

• Develop medicine to treat Chagas disease, which is spread by a parasite and is common in Central and South America.

• Shed light on ways to slow the progression of neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s disease.

And this year, DeepMind unveiled a new medical AI, with a weird name – AlphaMissense.

It’s aimed at helping doctors diagnose and treat people with genetic diseases.

63.2 Million Mutations

There are an estimated 71 million “missense” mutations.

These are errors in our genetic code. They can cause genetic diseases such as sickle cell anemia, muscular dystrophy, and early onset Alzheimer’s… as well as some types of cancer.

Until recently, scientists had only cataloged 0.1% of these missense mutations.

Then, DeepMind put its new AI system to the task… and changed the game again.

So far, AlphaMissense has cataloged 63.2 million missense mutations.

That’s 89% of the total estimated mutations.

This will lead to better diagnosis of genetic diseases as well as the development of new treatments for these diseases.

It could even help doctors develop personalized treatment plans for patients with genetic diseases.

They’ll be able to spot missense variants that are specific to us as individuals. And they’ll be able to develop treatments that target these unique variants.

And keep in mind… this is not from a drug research company or a leading biotech company. It’s from a Big Tech company out in Silicon Valley that made its money with its search algorithm and online ad network.

$244 Billion Opportunity

Last year, Big Pharma companies Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck, and Eli Lilly spent a combined $46.7 billion on research and development.

That’s roughly 16% of their combined revenues.

Within the next year, I predict there’ll be a deal between a major pharmaceutical company and Google for medical research.

That’s going to improve profitability for healthcare companies… because they can outsource their research and development. It will also open up a $244 billion opportunity for Google.

That’s the total amount the global pharmaceutical industry spent on medical research last year.

I’ll be getting into more detail about how Big Tech companies are expanding into healthcare in future dispatches.

What’s most important to focus on today is AI’s potential to shift the dominant paradigm of healthcare from treating diseases to preventing them.

There’s a narrative out there that says AIs are going to destroy us in some sort of Terminator-style showdown between humans and machines.

That makes for great science fiction.

But if you look at the science instead of the science fiction, it’s on track to save millions of lives. In just three years, AI’s gone from beating the world champion of Go to revealing millions of previously unknown genetic mutations.

And this is just the beginning.

With even more attention and money flowing into AI, we’ll see the rate of breakthroughs increase. My research suggests that these breakthroughs will have the power to end suffering before it even begins.

That’s the true power of AI: to improve our lives.

Regards,

Colin Tedards
Editor, The Bleeding Edge

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