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Clinical trials overnight on servers
Trials overnight
Picture a computer model of human biology detailed enough to stand in for a patient. A drug trial that takes a decade today would play out in a night, and the same model would show how different drugs and medicines act on the body.
Understanding ourselves
It would also teach people a great deal about themselves. The 20th century added 30 years to the average American lifespan, and the effort now reaches past defeating diseases toward improving every day a person lives, through longevity, health, and personalized medicine.
Intelligence pushing science
Intelligence has reached a point where it can push on science directly, from discovering new materials to personalized medicine. A world model of biology sits at the far end of that push.
Why do clinical trials take so long?
Trials run in sequence, and each phase has to finish before the next can start. According to the FDA, phase I tests safety in a small group, phase II looks for an effect in up to a few hundred people, and phase III confirms it in several hundred to several thousand. Diseases that develop slowly need years of follow-up to show any difference. A trial can also stall while enough eligible volunteers are found.
How far has computer modeling of biology come?
In 2020, DeepMind's AlphaFold2 predicted protein structures with accuracy close to laboratory experiments in the CASP14 competition. Structures like these took researchers months or years to determine by experiment. AlphaFold's creators Demis Hassabis and John Jumper shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with David Baker.
Why is simulating a whole human so hard?
A human body has roughly 37 trillion cells by one 2013 estimate from a team of Italian researchers led by Eva Bianconi, and each cell runs thousands of interacting chemical reactions. The first complete computer model of a single living cell was published in 2012 by researchers at Stanford and the J. Craig Venter Institute. It simulated the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium, which has 525 genes.
Why did lifespans rise 30 years last century?
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that life expectancy at birth rose from about 47 years in 1900 to about 77 years by 2000. Much of the gain came from fewer deaths in infancy and childhood, thanks to sanitation, clean water, vaccines, and antibiotics. The CDC says the infant mortality rate fell by about 90 percent from 1915 to 1997.
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