Patient tests may matter before new drugs reach the clinic

Transcript

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

1. 15:13

   last few months, you started to see regular frontier mainstream labs start to really invest in biology and drug discovery and all of these things. Some of their criticism is that they're doing it just to counter the doomers. But to be fair in their defense, if you're actually able to unlock cures to diseases that kill millions of people, that's a great thing. That is a huge reason to be optimistic. And so I wanted to get your take on maybe what Frontier Labs are doing.

2. 15:44

   Is it legit? Are they actually making an impact here? Or is it more of a charade? Yeah, I think it's a good question. I mean, of course, it's hard to know what's exactly happening in these Frontier Labs. And I think there are interesting things that they're doing. Right, Anthropic is releasing various blog posts and, you know, interesting projects, but like, it's still very limited in scope in what they're doing.

3. 16:07

   But I mean, I think like, I'm, I think it's a very promising direction that these frontier labs are moving in this space. I think, though, the challenge, in my opinion, is that, you know, again, the timelines of this is going to be very long. And I think like, if, if the timelines of this is very long, obviously, people should be working on this, the frontier labs should be working on this. But there's also other ways that we can impact, you know, the care of these patients.

4. 16:30

   And so, you know, again, these sorts of like developing different tests for, you know, improving diagnosis of these patients for, you know, understanding, you know, which drugs these patients respond to, all these things like directly affect, you know, these patients. And, you know, that can be done in a lot quicker timeline, in my opinion, compared to like developing drugs from scratch. And so I think, like, you know, I hope that, you know, people in the AI space try to identify more, like, some of these areas where they can have more immediate impact on patient lives.

5. 17:04

   Because I think, you know, if we're telling people AI can, you know, save lives and, you know, cure cancer and all those sorts of things, but, you know, people are waiting, you know, 10 years while all this other stuff is happening in the AI space as well. it's, it's, it's, it's very hard for people to kind of, uh, understand like that. Yes. Like it will come in like 10 years, but the thing is like, there are interesting things that can actually have impact that you can do right now. And so that's kind of what, you know, I think the stuff that, you know, you know, we're exploring can have impact in a, in a much shorter period compared to what, uh, the, the, you know, developing a drug from scratch may be able to do, for example.

6. 17:42

   Um, but you know, at least that's what, that's my, my opinion and that's how I hope things will go. But, you know, I think like this is the kind of challenges, you know, the labs are all promising that they're going to have all this impact, but it's going to take a while for this to happen. And so I think there's a little bit of like cognitive dissonance going on there that, you know, people are kind of now starting to catch on.

7. 18:02

   And so I hope people will start to work on like addressing some of these more short term kind of problems instead. We'll continue monitoring right after this message from our sponsors.