Using thousands of AI agents to uncover new leads in biological data

SimianSci 28 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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jostmey an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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i000 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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pebbly_bread an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you can increase the fidelity of your research model (in-silico, murine, etc) to real life humans then there are fewer false leads.

	▲	moregrist 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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qurren an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The real problem is generating leads that are more likely to yield positive results than throwing darts at hypotheses.

That's what top-tier scientists are good at.

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throw310822 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

"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.

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vatsachak 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"new leads"

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

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suddenlybananas 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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!

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Noaidi 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/07/alzheimers-st...

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dude250711 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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?"