Medicine has made remarkable advances in the last ~125 years. Even a random short list of the advances is extraordinary: Blood transfusion, antibiotics, insulin, vaccines, medical imaging, stem cell therapy, dialysis, laser surgery, and even the humble ambulance are just some of the discoveries, inventions, and innovations that have joined forces in the battle against disease and disability. They have helped change life expectancy dramatically, from 32 years in 1900 to 71 years in 2021. But the last decade or so has held the greatest promise. Medical science has found what is, perhaps, its most capable partner in the quest to improve the quality of our lives — technology in the form of Artificial Intelligence and, significantly, in its latest avatar of Generative AI (GenAI). The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) estimates that GenAI could generate $60 billion to $110 billion a year in economic value for the pharma and medical-product industries — accounting for between 1.8 and 3.2 percent of industry revenue. At this point, an interesting question to explore is: “In which areas of medicine are the most immediate advances likely to emerge?”
GenAI is currently being applied in medical research to discover and optimize new molecules, accelerate clinical development, and drive trials through the minefield of regulatory requirements. It is being used for the early detection of diseases, enabling more accurate diagnosis, driving clinical decision-making, personalizing therapy, and improving patient care and patient interactions. In other words, there is hardly any area of modern medicine that GenAI will not touch.
Fortunately, pharma companies are no newcomers to AI. Long before GenAI swept the world away, the protein folding community was using AI-based models such as AlphaFold2, ESMFold, and MoLeR to understand and predict protein structures and the biological mechanisms behind them, providing a solid foundation for reliable drug design. Medical practitioners have been using deep learning models during routine clinical workflows, supplementing the analysis of medical imaging and predicting the impact of treatments.
GenAI has become a tool for exploring the frontiers of medicine. The Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024, published by the Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), Stanford University, says investments in GenAI have “skyrocketed” from $2.82 billion in 2022 to $25.2 billion in 2023. The report provides four key takeaways about GenAI’s impact on medical science. At a hefty 500+ pages, the report is among the most reliable and keenly followed across disciplines (if you are short on time, senior editors at IEEE Spectrum pick the most important charts from each year’s report and publish it. The 15 charts for 2024 can be found here). Here are the four most notable areas of advancement in the world of medicine (paraphrased) from the report:
· The most significant AI applications (compared to any other year in the past) were launched in 2023 — from AlphaDev, which makes algorithmic sorting more efficient, to GNoME, which facilitates the process of materials discovery.
· In 2023, several significant medical systems were launched, including EVEscape, which enhances pandemic prediction, and AlphaMissense, which assists in AI-driven mutation classification.
· The standout MedQA model of 2023, GPT-4 Medprompt (a key test for assessing AI’s clinical knowledge), reached an accuracy rate of 90.2%. Since the benchmark’s introduction in 2019, AI performance on MedQA has nearly tripled, prompting the report to observe that “Highly knowledgeable medical AI has arrived.”
· Since 2012, the number of FDA-approved AI-related medical devices has increased by more than 45-fold. AI is increasingly being used for real-world medical purposes.
Aside from the significant leaps in medical science that these developments will enable in the immediate future, the impact of GenAI is already becoming evident. Take, for example, Insilico Medicine, a Hong Kong-based GenAI-driven biotech company. The company identified a preclinical drug candidate to combat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in 18 months. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is a respiratory disorder that causes an irreversible decline in lung function. The company took a mere 12 additional months to get the preclinical drug candidate from Phase 0 to Phase 1 clinical trial.
According to researchers, a new drug in 2021 could cost anywhere between $161 million and $4.54 billion and take several years to develop. In the case of Insilico Medicine, the research cost just $2.6M and 30 months, telling us how vast the impact on drug research could be — and how it could help lower the cost of medication.
It isn’t just the cost and time that GenAI will alter. It will also be able to address some of the most perplexing medical problems that have confounded mankind. For example, one of the toughest battles being fought by the medical community is against cancer. In 2022, GLOBOCAN identified close to 20 million new cases alongside 9.7 million deaths from cancer. The estimates suggest that approximately one in five men or women develop cancer in a lifetime, whereas around one in nine men and one in 12 women die from it. New workflows driven by GenAI are creating a more personalized approach based on biomarker-guided treatments for cancer patients. The technology for precision oncology will combine and analyze extremely large multi-modal datasets (electronic medical records, radiology scans, genomics, family history, pathology studies, dosage impact, OPD interactions, patient sentiments, diagnostics and prognosis, therapy efficacy and toxicity, survival analysis, disease recurrence, etc.) to help arrive at a more accurate understanding of patient-centric treatments. Hopefully, cancer will not be as feared as it currently is.
We know that a healthy society is a happy society. It is more productive, lives longer, lives to the fullest, and, as a result, has a more significant stake in the planet’s well-being. If GenAI can accelerate our progress to a world where disease and disability do not hold us back, we will make more rapid progress in every other facet of life.
