AI Doctor

CHAPTER 11 AI Applications in Life Sciences

THE CALIFORNIA BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATION says that it currently takes an average of 12 years for a drug in the United States to go from the research lab to the patient (Figures 11.1 and 11.2). Only one in every thousand drugs that begins preclinical testing ever makes it to human testing, and that has to happen five times before one gets approved. It costs companies an average of $359 million to take a new drug from the research lab to the patient.

It's widely accepted that artificial intelligence (AI) will be a game changer for life sciences. Discovering and creating new diagnostics and treatments will increasingly require dealing with huge amounts of data such as genomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics. This data is large in volume and has many dimensions, and so only AI can analyze it to identify patterns and make predictions. It's impossible for the human mind to understand how billions of genetic codes interact with the various mutations, as well as the relative contribution of each mutation.

AI allows us to look forward to an era of faster drug discovery, better clinical trials, better diagnostics, and faster vaccine discovery (as with COVID‐19) (Figure 11.3). To realize this potential, we need to tackle many of the issues we've already discussed, and it all comes back to data.

The data that we need to facilitate this change is in a chaotic format right now. The historic data collected while developing new molecules ...