Ai labs look to be desperate to try and stave off the cooling hype that looks to be snowballing in the industry right now. These next few months are going to be crucial to their potential survival and future.
Its not surprising to me that this press release looks half-baked.
I hope OpenAI will prove its usefulness in stealing joy from mathematicians, engineers, and biologists this time. It feels like there's a chance of warmer feedback this time from everyone out there keeping an eye on what they do.
Personally I would forgive all of the joy being stolen by AI if they discover something fundamental and outstanding that would help all of us.
The problem was never generating leads. The bottleneck is validated results. It’s performing clinical trials proving efficacy. And this is where I think AI will have the biggest impact—-helping scientist, navigate study complexity and regulatory burden
That is not true. For many diseases we lack good hypotheses about the underlying causal mechanisms which resulted in decades and billions being pumped into few questionable targets (e.g. amyloid and alzheimers). In other diseases such as many cancers we often lack "actionable" targets, resulting in hundreds me-too companies all chasing the same target with only subtle variations in approach (inefficient capital alocation).
So AI could help a lot in discovery, much more than the engineering like uses in antibody/drug optimization.
Drug design is hard because it’s a system problem not a molecule-protein interaction problem.
At one point the gold standard for generating leads was using combinatorial chemistry to experimentally screen through millions of compounds.
I’m not sure how wide-spread that is any more; it used a lot of reagents. And it ran into the real bottleneck: lead generation tells you little to nothing about the efficacy, toxicity, and side effects of a drug or biologic in actual humans.
In silicon will never do a better job at lead generation than combinatorial chemistry. It could help with the real bottleneck. But… there just isn’t a lot of high quality training data on this.
They’ve been pushing ML approaches to drug design since at least the early 2010s. The approach has evolved with the trends in ML. Overall, I think the results have been very mixed; much like the traditional pharma pipeline.
> At one point the gold standard for generating leads was using combinatorial chemistry to experimentally screen through millions of compounds.
I don't think this was ever the gold standard. I mean, some companies did employ these approaches, but they were generally viewed as low-quality, brute-force approaches (at least at the handful of companies I was associated with).
"The problem was never generating leads" is an absurd statement without any reference to the quality of those leads. Ideally you want a system able to generate one more lead, the correct one.
Why waste so much space on a chart on whether "human experts preferred distributed-agent reports over single-agent reports"? I thought we were supposed to be curing alzheimer's and cancer!
I use LLMs every day but damn... can we please market them and value them as a coding tool and not the savior/destroyer of the world. "new leads" comes off flat after the previous tone
I am sorry, but if you still have stupid humans these leads will end up going the same place all the leads go. Nowhere.
So what if DCTN1 is linked to Alzheimer's? All they will do is invent a drug to mess with the enzyme and it might only still help a small percentage of people and no one will be able to afford it.
It is well know that diet plays a large role in Alzheimer's[1] and is largely an issue of personal genetics and environment.
OpenAI in sciences: "We have bitten off a bit of each of these apples - you guys finish eating them, because that is what you are best at - finishing half-eaten food. May we have a $2T valuation, please?"
Its not surprising to me that this press release looks half-baked.
Personally I would forgive all of the joy being stolen by AI if they discover something fundamental and outstanding that would help all of us.
So AI could help a lot in discovery, much more than the engineering like uses in antibody/drug optimization.
At one point the gold standard for generating leads was using combinatorial chemistry to experimentally screen through millions of compounds.
I’m not sure how wide-spread that is any more; it used a lot of reagents. And it ran into the real bottleneck: lead generation tells you little to nothing about the efficacy, toxicity, and side effects of a drug or biologic in actual humans.
In silicon will never do a better job at lead generation than combinatorial chemistry. It could help with the real bottleneck. But… there just isn’t a lot of high quality training data on this.
They’ve been pushing ML approaches to drug design since at least the early 2010s. The approach has evolved with the trends in ML. Overall, I think the results have been very mixed; much like the traditional pharma pipeline.
I don't think this was ever the gold standard. I mean, some companies did employ these approaches, but they were generally viewed as low-quality, brute-force approaches (at least at the handful of companies I was associated with).
That's what top-tier scientists are good at.
I use LLMs every day but damn... can we please market them and value them as a coding tool and not the savior/destroyer of the world. "new leads" comes off flat after the previous tone
So what if DCTN1 is linked to Alzheimer's? All they will do is invent a drug to mess with the enzyme and it might only still help a small percentage of people and no one will be able to afford it.
It is well know that diet plays a large role in Alzheimer's[1] and is largely an issue of personal genetics and environment.
[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/07/alzheimers-st...