Moneyball Medicine

Thomas Chittenden, chief data science officer at Genuity Science, says what's keeping the genomics revolution from turning into an equivalent revolution in drug discovery is that most of our domain knowledge about the molecular biology of disease has come from a hunt-and-peck approach, focused on one gene at a time. Find some gene relevant to a disease, knock it out, and you see what happens. Such experiments are always revealing, but the reality is that human biology is the product of the interactions of huge networks of thousands of genes—which means most diseases are the product of dysregulation across these networks. Which means, in turn, that to figure out where to intervene with a drug, you really need to identify the patterns that cascade through the whole network. That’s where AI and machine learning come in, and that’s why Genuity has tasked Chittenden to lead R&D at its Advanced Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory. Chittenden's team is pioneering new applications of old ideas from the wo