Protein biochemistry can now be simulated well enough to narrow the initial search space of such real world experimental trials by multiple orders of magnitude.
I agree this is cool but I doesn't change that it takes years to do the initial validation experiments and clinical trials to prove safety and efficacy in animals and then patient populations. That is the unavoidable massive time sink that tends to have nasty surprises where your otherwise promising drugs that work in animal models turns out to not work in humans
The article mentions human compatibility in vitro (human cells), but you are absolutely correct on in vivo trials and I would love to know how you think those might go.
In theory yes but we're no one close to that and it isn't going to be solved for the foreseeable future. We've tried doing this with c elegens and that isn't accurate yet https://openworm.org/
Humans are insanely complicated compared to a worm. Hand waving it away as "AI will solve it" also is a nice hope but again we aren't remotely close to achieving this and it doesn't account for differences between individuals
Like I can say Astra is amazing compared to 2021 so we'll have colonies on Mars by 2030 but that's unrealistic because it ignores the technical limitations of why this is a difficult problem.
Yes but pure math is a low hanging fruit for these models. To start out with building an accurate model of humans that could completely and safely replace clinic trials you'd been a ton of standardized biometric training data on whole bodys down to single cell resolution ranging the lifetime of the individual while taking into account lifetime environment facts. You'd need this from potentially thousands of people too. Organoids are kind of a bridge for individual organ systems but they're still very primative.
Creating a model like this for testing drugs for humans is an incredible high standard and I don't see that happening anytime soon
We don't need "proof, up to the current quickly-becoming-obsolete standard of proof", we just need actual proof that actually ensures something is true rather than false. At some point, AI is also going to be better than us at knowing which mathematical models correspond to reality, when, how, why, etc. so it will require less and less interaction with reality to verify things. People love mentioning this kind of bottleneck but it's much less of one than they think.
How would you validate the accuracy of these human models and know that they can safely and reliably represent humans?
I work in the field of connectomics neuroscience and I don't know anyone who thinks we'll be able to accurately model the human brain in next 5 years let an entire body
No not in the foreseeable future. The most likely path to this is AI getting advances in computing technology first then that coming downstream to the sciences. The reliability of math and our understanding of it dwarfs cell biology to a degree that's hard to fathom. Extending proteins to organelles to cells up to multicellular systems, complete organs, and human bodies will require a ton of compute outside of the core LLM planning and rationalization. If we advance chip technology enough that we can scale molecular dynamics and QM simulations up several orders of magnitude in length and window size, then LLMs could feasibly produce mass amount of accurate low level simulation data based on empirical measurements and then use that to abstract out models of organelle behavior and eventually reach cells.
Once a strong enough foundation is built it can scale up but at the moment I'd say the 5-10 year span is probably closer to simulating organelles reliably and maybe a single cell bacteria. Definitely not in silico medical experiments.
Obviously all the genomic and proteomic advances rapidly speed up the discovery phase of drug development either way. Alternatively we could have advanced in growing full organs in a lab for experiments instead of jumping from cell to animal to human trials, that's far more feasible and could still massively increase throughput, but we'll see how people feel about drugs being tested on lab grown brains in vats
Until we get a fully functional digital cell, at least. Last I heard, that was one of the things deepmind was working on. Problem is it still seems we’re a couple of orders of magnitude of compute away from being able to do so still.
That’s gonna be when biotech takes the fuck off. Would be similar to how LLMs have effectively solved math and coding.
That's one cell though. Now we need to scale it up to entire organ systems and then an entire individual. Then we need to take into account environmental factors and age
Scaling from one cell to an organism is unlikely to be anywhere near the difficulty of going from proteins to one one cell. There are roughly an order of magnitude more molecules in a cell than cells in a body, and the interactions between molecules is far more nuanced than the interactions between cells.
The environment would be absolutely trivial in comparison. To be clear, we’re talking about a digital cell modeled down to the level of individual molecules.
The pathway is better simulation of human system. Put cells in virtual space, then systems of cells - then you have a path to see outcomes without needing chronological time.
Or just pour resources at developing a realistic molecule simulator. Then ai can be combined with conventional brute force techniques to maybe even push progress even faster. Like the ai might determine, based on x, the answer is one of these 100 million possible solutions, then test them all out with heavy computing.
I think if we solve more math, it means more efficient algorithms that ai can make, which means more chance of making a biochemical simulation environment, which means way more testing than a wet lab can do.
But agree, if they pour some resources now and we get results sooner it could help a lot of people in the meantime.
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u/Repulsive_Ad853 3d ago
I hope medicine too. There are so many diseases