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Moonshots · 3 min · Oct 24, 2024

Simulations could compress early drug discovery to days

Ray Kurzweil says simulation narrowed billions of COVID vaccine candidates to one in two days, before human trials. He expects simulated biology to speed testing too.

RK

Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, AI researcher and futurist.

  • Peter Diamandis, Host · Founder & executive chairman, XPRIZE Foundation

    Co-founded Singularity University and founded Zero-G; co-wrote the books Abundance and Bold.

About this segment

Ray Kurzweil says simulation narrowed billions of COVID vaccine candidates to one in two days, before human trials. He expects simulated biology to speed testing too.

From “The Man Who Predicted AGI Decades Ago w/ Ray Kurzweil | EP #125”, Oct 24, 2024. Watch the full episode

“They actually created that vaccine in two days.”
RKRay Kurzweilat 53:42 · Moonshots53:42

Takeaways

  1. Researchers simulated billions of mRNA candidates in two days.
  2. Human testing still took 10 months in his example.
  3. He predicts simulated biology will accelerate testing and drug discovery.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 20:00Computing power keeps accelerating across hardware and software4:32
  2. 27:02Automation will displace jobs before creating new kinds of work4:18
  3. 42:50Kurzweil expects longevity escape velocity around 20325:41

  4. 52:18Simulations could compress early drug discovery to days2:51

  5. 36:25Brain-to-cloud links may not need molecular nanomachines3:34Up next
  6. 40:21AI-designed proteins could help target cancer cells2:36
  7. 4:05Larry Page offered to buy Kurzweil's startup outright2:24
  8. 12:44Kurzweil has held to his 2029 AGI forecast since 19992:37

Transcript

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

  1. 52:22

    Any other fun predictions or conversations you've had in the back halls of Google? Well, all the things that we do. I mean, what's really... Exciting to me, when we created pharmaceuticals, we go to a person who's had some experience and they have some idea of what might be a pharmaceutical interaction. and they worked for 10 years testing it on people and maybe if they're lucky they'll find some pharmaceuticals. Most of the pharmaceuticals on the market today were done that way.

  2. 53:07

    So when we're doing a long to find a COVID vaccine they made a list of all the different mRNA sequences that might create COVID and they had several billion of them. So you would actually test all several billion on humans. That's impossible to do. So they actually simulated that. And they simulated in two days, they tried all several billion in different ways. They could eliminate this patch and this patch and they had found one thing that caused COVID and they came up with a vaccine.

  3. 53:47

    They actually created that vaccine in two days. Now, we actually then tested it on humans. It took 10 months. We'll be able to eliminate that by testing it also by using simulated biology and do that in a few days. And we'll be able to actually test every type of medication we want against cancer and so on very quickly. and it'll be millions of times faster than what we've done. Especially with alpha proteo, right?

  4. 54:25

    That's part of the process to actually come up with proteins that can do that. Human trials are slow, they're risky, they're expensive, they take a long time. We'll be able to do this much more quickly, literally millions of times faster over the next few years. So I think we're going to actually, and already there's things on the market that were done that way for cancer and so on. I've got people who've got cancer and actually trying these new things.

  5. 55:01

    It's going to be really fantastic over the next few years. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer?