Anthropic is making biotech boasts, but scientists are wary of hype around ‘curing cancer’ | Latest Tech News
Anthropic has been pushing is biotechnology initiatives in a bid to drive up its stock price, but scientists warn people need to be life like.
The AI giant has opened a biology lab in the Bay Area, purchased two biotech startups — one for about $400 million in stock — and partnered with drugmakers including Bristol Myers, Squibb and Novo.
CEO Dario Amodei predicted highly effective AI may cram 50 to 100 years of organic progress into the next 5 to 10. This summer season, he wrote promising AI will remedy cancer had turn into a “cliché” and that “the thing that will work is actually curing cancer.”
While AI from Anthropic and other firms has vastly benefitted the medical industry, people working in the medical subject all their careers warning against hype.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted highly effective AI may cram 50 to 100 years of organic progress into 5 to 10. AP Photo/Markus Schreiber
“A good chunk of the timeframe has passed since [Amodei’s prediction], but we are far away from that goal,” Andreas Bender, a professor of machine learning in drugs at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, told the Post.
“The human proof point is what counts, such as a clinical trial,” added Bender, who has co-founded a number of AI drug-discovery startups and has no ties to Anthropic.
No drug developed by AI has yet received full approval from the Food and Drug Administration and the leap from the lab to the human physique is where most medicines die.
“You can do an experiment, things work very well, you have all kinds of supporting data from cells or mice or from biopsies, and then it gets to the clinic and fails completely,” a Silicon Valley cancer scientist with over 10 years of expertise in the sector, told the Post.
Andreas Bender, a professor of machine learning in drugs at Khalifa University, said AI is still “far away from the goal” of curing disease. Seth Carnill
Biochemist Sarah Martin works in a lab at Servier Pharmaceuticals in Boston in 2022. Anthropic is betting its AI can pace up drug discovery, but no AI-discovered drug has yet received full FDA approval. Boston Globe via Getty Images
“You can pour millions of dollars and thousands of man hours on some method that looks wonderful in the lab, but when it gets to clinical trials, nothing happens. And it’s not because someone was stupid,” the scientist, who requested not to be named, said.
“Every human is drastically different from every other in multiple hundreds, thousands of parameters,” he said. “That’s why so many drugs might work in a very neat, organized system, but once you get to the real world, they won’t.”
Personalized medicines are one of the methods AI — from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and other labs — is serving to to improve the medical subject and remedies for people who are ailing, notably those with cancer.
But still only about one in 10 medication which enter human trials ever attain the market — and for cancer medication, it’s nearer to 1 in 20, industry data exhibits.
The drug industry’s bosses are blunt in their evaluation of cancer being cured anytime soon.
A researcher works in a lab at Xencor, a biopharmaceutical company, in Pasadena, Calif., in 2023. Even with AI in the lab, people still run the experiments and determine which medication are value thousands and thousands of {dollars} in scientific trials. MediaNews Group via Getty Images
“That’s complete BS,” Jeff Leiden, government chairman of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, told the Wall Street Journal this week, recalling a tech chief who claimed AI would remedy 90% of human disease in seven years. Vertex has run its 10,000-compound library past roughly 50 AI firms, and none produced a working drug, he said.
However, not everybody is as pessimistic. The Silicon Valley cancer scientist doesn’t suppose Amodei’s timeline is too formidable.
“It is like criticizing the first planes,” he said. “Of course they are not going to be perfect, but these are the first steps.”
Cody Tranbarger was the only full-time worker of Mithril Medicine, the one-man drug company Anthropic purchased after he used Claude to juggle experiments across 11 outdoors labs. LinkedIn
But even he says people, not chatbots, will likely be making the big calls for many years to come.
“Are the lab results good enough to justify pouring $25 million into clinical trials that could have gone into something else? AI won’t decide that in the next 10 years,” he said.
“So much is at stake that it has to be a human that decides those things, a committee of humans.”
Bender’s message to Amodei: biology is not physics.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who earned a Ph.D. in biophysics before he bought into AI, is “able to appreciate the life sciences better than many other CEOs of technology companies,” Bender said. Bloomberg via Getty Images
Anthropic didn’t reply to The Post’s requests for remark. In its own announcement, the company acknowledged work is “early” and “mostly preclinical,” that means the medication haven’t yet been examined in people.
Meanwhile, the scientist laid out precisely what would make him a believer.
“Show me the AI that really develops a revolutionary new drug for some unmet medical need,” he said. “Show me something that scientists have been struggling with for 10, 15 years, and all of a sudden the AI can really reliably find a solution for it that no one thought about.”
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