A virtual cell could move drug discovery into simulation

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 39:29

   a virtual cell. Yes. What is that and what does it get us? Yeah. Well, so if you think about what we did with alpha fold was essentially solve the problem of finding the structure of a protein. proteins, everything in life depends on proteins, right? Everything in your body. So that's the kind of static picture of a protein. But the thing about biology is really it's, you only understand what's going on in biology if you understand the dynamics and the interactions between the different things in a cell.

2. 39:58

   And so a virtual cell project is about building a simulation, an AI simulation of a full working cell. I probably start with something like a yeast cell because of the simplicity of the yeast organism. and you have to build up there. So the next step is with alpha-fold 3, for example, we started doing pair-wise interactions between proteins and ligands and proteins and DNA, proteins and RNA. And then the next step would be modeling a whole pathway, maybe a cancer pathway or something like that that would be helpful for solving a disease.

3. 40:30

   And then finally, a whole cell. And the reason that's important is you would be able to make hypotheses and test those hypotheses about making some change, some nutrient change or injecting a drug into the cell and then seeing what happens to the how the cell responds and at the moment of course you have to do that painstakingly in a wet lab but imagine if you could do it a thousand a million times faster in silico first and only at the last step do you do a validation in the wet lab so instead of doing the search in in in the wet lab which is millions of times more expensive and time consuming than the validation step you just do the search part in silico so it's again it's sort of translating again We did in the games environments, but here in the sciences and the biology. So you build a model, and then you use that to do the reasoning and the search over. And then the predictions are, you know, at least better than, maybe they're not perfect, but they're useful enough to be useful for experimentalists to validate against.

4. 41:33

   And the wet lab is within people. Yeah. So the wet lab, you'd still need a final step with the wet lab to prove what the predictions were actually valid. So, you know, but you wouldn't have to do all of the work to get to that prediction in the wet lab. So you just get, here's the prediction. If you put this chemical in, this should be the change. Right. And then you just do that one experiment. So and then after that, of course, you still have to have clinical trials.

5. 42:00

   if you're talking about a drug you would still need to test that properly through the clinical trials and so on and test it on humans for efficacy and so on that i also think could be improved with ai that whole clinic that's also takes many many years but that would be a different technology from the virtual cell the virtual cell would be would be helping the discovery phase for drugs just like i have idea for a drug throw it in the virtual cell see what it does yeah and maybe