Imagine this lock is a disease. And imagine this key is the cure.
Opening the lock means finding the right treatment.
But here's the catch: You're not faced with just one key, but millions of them.
Now, you could try one key at the time, that’s kinda what researchers have done
up until now, or… you can
predict which one is the right key… with Artificial Intelligence.
“AI is reinventing drug discovery” “AI drug discovery”
“AI-powered tools to accelerate drug discovery”
Scientists around the world are using AI to discover new medicines.
And in the process, they could be unlocking the secret to a longer, healthier life.
Aging can be targeted. Aging can be delayed. And aging, in certain ways,
can be stopped and reversed also.”
So what exactly is AI drug discovery? And could it help us live longer?
I'm interested in utilizing AI as a tool that can solve biomedical problems,
With a AI, you can increase the probability of success and also make it cheaper and faster.
Vanessa and Alex are two researchers working
on one of the most promising applications of AI to healthcare:
Drug discovery Drug discovery
Drug discovery consists in finding new medications to treat diseases.
In this case, we are focusing on diseases caused by proteins
– like Osteoarthritis, Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer's,
And on medications based on molecules – like Ibuprofen, Paracetamol, or Viagra
Those are small molecules that bind to those proteins and disable them
or disable their expression that modulates the disease.
And because the process is partially repetitive, it can be partially automated.
The idea of utilizing a computer to aid the drug discovery process
is not new. It's something that has been tried for many decades before.
But AI goes beyond automation; it predicts. It looks at good candidates
understands common features and predicts other good candidates
But you could also take it a step further
Imagine the new key from scratch with the desired
properties. So you create a set of perfect keys that all fit the lock.
Some molecules discovered with AI have already entered clinical trials,
and the field is attracting billions in investments.
So it’s clear that the approach is very promising. But there’s more! Some researchers are looking
for a cure to something most of us don’t even consider a disease …aging
What is aging? Do we have to age? Aging is a biological process. Is it inevitable
and can we delay aging and death? Well, we cannot delay death, but we can do something about aging.
This is Nir Barzilai, a groundbreaking researcher in the science of longevity.
One of the things that happen when we cross the age of 60, we're starting to accumulate disease
after disease and treatment after treatment for diseases that were not part of our evolution.
Right? People didn't die from dementia or from cardiovascular disease.
And here is the paradigm shift: instead of trying to cure each disease that comes with aging,
why not just cure aging itself and hence eliminate all those diseases?
Aging is the mother of those diseases,
okay? They lead to those diseases. Those diseases don't happen when you're young.
There are many approaches to "curing" aging. Vanessa is working on senescent cells.
One of the things that happens with aging, we accumulate what's called zombie cells. Or, we call
them senescent cells. That when they accumulate, they cause an environment to age and get diseases.
We want something that kills only the bad cells. But there are very few
senolytics known - that’s a class of molecules that can kill the senescent
cells - So the idea is that we thought, why not utilize AI to try and find these drugs faster?
And they did.
Vanessa, her team, and AI, found what may be the most promising senolytic ever seen.
So will AI make us live longer? Well, let’s have a look.
Finding the right molecule, is only the first step of drug discovery.
To get an idea of how the whole process works, we are visiting a lab in Berlin.
We meet with David Bushiri for a peek inside his lab in Berlin.
He and his team walk us through the main stages of drug discovery.
Actually you don't know what most of molecules are doing. There are maybe
just a few thousands of molecules where we actually know what they are doing and
cells and on the human body. But there are many, many more molecules available.
The first step is to decide which molecules to test.
You just test many, many compounds as
much as possible to see if they would be active on this disease.
There’s 170 thousand molecules in that freezer? Wow.
And these little dots that we see, each one of those contains a molecule?
Exactly.
This machine moves the molecules on the proteins they want to target.
So now the compound plate is finished, is ready. And now comes the actual transfer.
Next up, this other machine uses a powerful microscope to capture their interaction.
Wow! It looks so weird. It looks like an alien. That’s how you look inside, bro.
I come actually after this. So then because if you do this kind of experiments,
you might end up with a lot of data. Here in this lab,
for example, we are collecting sometimes tens of thousands of images that a human
couldn't possibly analyze all of this and this is basically where machine learning can step in.
Neural networks scan the images to find good candidates.
For example here we have a lot of anti-bacteria agents which are
clustered together. If we have another molecule where we don’t know what kind
of pharmacological activity it has and we see that it’s really close to anti-bacteria
agents in this space we can also maybe think that this is as well an anti-bacteria agent.
But every prediction AI makes still needs to be tested.
Once you have discovered molecules that you think are promising than you have to
come back here and test them again in the real world in an actual lab.
Exactly
And the journey doesn't end there. Even if the in-vitro tests confirm the predictions made by AI,
there are still many steps necessary to ensure that a drug is safe and effective.
If you then want to go to the market and actually sell it of course,
then you go to the clinical trials.
Clinical trials take a long time and there’s little AI
can do to speed up that part of the process.
AI is a disruptive technology, but not a fountain of youth.
At least for now, it can only speed up the first step of the drug discovery process.
I do not think that this is a miracle or something of this sort. // If everything
goes according to plan, I will hope that for certain longevity-related diseases,
there will be senolytics available for patients to take in the next 10 years.
But there are many things we can do right now that don’t require AI.
Both personally,
So right now, the toolkit that you can use legally is do what your mama told you. So don't overeat,
sleep abundantly, exercise, and don't stress too much.
And as a society,
life expectancy for people who are doing well, educated, having money,
is much closer to, you know, 85, 90 years old already, without even special drugs.
And it's really the poor people that need help and help now.
Moreover, the debate on increasing our lifespan misses a more important point.
The researchers I talked to are not really trying to find drugs that make us live longer,
but healthier. They don’t want to increase our lifespan, but our healthspan.
People are saying all I care about healthspan. I said, but you know,
I have bad news for you There is a side effect. You might live longer.
It's kind of disappointing, don't you think,
to think that maybe a few generations from now people will live much longer than
us? How do you feel when you think about that we just maybe might have missed it?
You know, my generation is married for over 30 years. This hasn't happened in evolution,
and not everybody can sustain that. And people are saying, so what, I'll live another 150 years,
really, eventually I'm not going to get divorced? How is it going to happen?