Artificial Intelligence is poised to Augment the 🧬 Life sciences in 2023

ESM Metagenomic Atlas: The first view of the ‘dark matter’ of the protein universe, by Meta AI

Photo by Ryo Tanaka on Unsplash

Hey Guys,

The failure of robo-taxis to scale into mass adoption cost Venture Capitalists over $100 Billion and while “Generative A.I.” is getting a lot of hype in the second half of 2022, I actually think 2023 might be the year of A.I. in Life Sciences.

Let me tell you a bit about why that’s my hunch.

According to Nathan Benaich, under the radar, Meta has actually been one of the pioneers of Protein Language Modeling.

He notes that Verge Genomics, an AI-powered drug discovery platform, announced that it had begun (FT paywalled) its clinical trial. The drug, named VRG50635, targets a neurodegenerative disease with no known cure called ALS. This grows his count in the State of AI Report of assets in clinical trials to 19. Verge Genomics joins the likes of Abcellera, Exscientia, Recursion, etc. We’ll still need a year or two for early efficacy readouts of AI-designed drugs in clinical trials. 

Google and Microsoft are really fine tuning their approach to A.I. in Life Sciences as well. A.I. in drug development is really maturing fairly well and biotechnology and genomics has enormous potential as well as a more global focus of machine learning’s impact in the future of healthcare.

Apple also has significant incentives to do further R&D in Healthcare applications. Apple has a market cap of over $2.2 Trillion as of today.

With Life Sciences, the impact of A.I. will mean guaranteed A.I. for Good outcomes. AlphaFold is an artificial intelligence program developed by DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, which performs predictions of protein structure. The program is designed as a deep learning system. The way protein folding prediction has evolved shows A.I’s compute power growing.

Meta is Calling it a Breakthrough

Meta AI @MetaAI

Meta AI researchers trained a language model to fill in protein sequence gaps across millions of diverse proteins & scaled up to 15B parameters, creating the largest language model of proteins to date. More on our latest breakthrough in protein folding ➡️ bit.ly/3WoWcK2

Meta AI releases models of over 600 million potential proteins

You don’t have to be a science geek to appreciate where A.I. research into the Life Sciences is taking us.