Moneyball Medicine

It may feel like generative AI technology suddenly burst onto the scene over the last year or two, with the appearance of text-to-image models like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion, or chatbots like ChatGPT that can churn out astonishingly convincing text thanks to the power of large language models. But in fact, the real work on generative AI has been happening in the background, in small increments, for many years. One demonstration of that comes from Insilico Medicine, where Harry's guest this week, Alex Zhavoronkov, is the co-CEO. Since at least 2016, Zhavoronkov has been publishing papers about the power of a class of AI algorithms called generative adversarial networks or GANs to help with drug discovery. One of the main selling points for GANs in pharma research is that they can generate lots of possible designs for molecules that could carry out specified functions in the body, such as binding to a defective protein to stop it from working. Drug hunters still have to sort through all the possible molecules