Saying you'll cure cancer with AI without specifying the type of cancer is like declaring you'll solve crime with Batman. Way too broad to be useful, but makes a good headline.
When we say "She has cancer" we mean "a cancer". (Hopefully she doesn't have all of them!). Why couldn't the sentence "AI will cure cancer" mean "a cancer" as well?
"She has cancer" is a specific event, so we logically deduce that it is "a type of cancer".
When you say "AI will cure cancer" that is not a singular event, so you assume cancer in the plural. You would have to say "AI will cure some forms of cancer" if you didn't mean the plural here.
Asking Stable Diffusion for a picture of the chemical structure of a drug to cure even one specific unsolved cancer… I'd be surprised if that ever works (but given how crazy the rate of change has been, only 2σ of surprise).
I kind of feel like that's exactly why AI is helpful here:
- Grab a cancer (or virus, bacteria, etc.)
- Sequence it
- AI will develop a custom therapy for that cancer
In broad strokes, it's not hard to develop a therapy for any specific cancer or other disease in a specific individual. There are several broad strategies:
- A targeted, custom phage to kill a bacteria (or extrapolate to killing a type of cells)
- A custom vaccine to make your body make antibodies specific to a disease
- And so on....
This is a ≈2 year research effort to do in each case, and perhaps a ≈10 year validation effort, not to mention regulatory. By that point, the patient is dead, or AIDS has mutated a few dozen times, and regardless, you need a massive research team to do so. And to do so, you've spent many million dollars on a research team that whole time.
"AI will cure [X]" consists of AI doing the same thing instantly. I go to a doctor. My chronic disease is sequenced. My specific immune system is encouraged to attack that specific disease. I'm cured.
(And yes, we each have a very different immune system; see MHC for an example of how and why)
How? You’re hiding a ton of complicated work in these 2 words
> AI will develop a custom therapy
This statement suggests you really don’t know what you’re talking about with regards to AI.
AI doesn’t develop treatments magically. Work needs to be don’t to curate a dataset of treatments and diseases, BUT even then AI can’t create new treatments for existing untreatable cancer as we don’t have any data to go off of.
At that point, a team of doctors might as well analyze the data themselves (probably using a more specific kind of ML technique)
You’re too cavalier in hand waving away the real work by saying things like “AI will do this. Ez. 2 years”
> How? You’re hiding a ton of complicated work in these 2 words
DNA sequencing has been following a Moore's Law style curve. It is cheap and easy now.
> > AI will develop a custom therapy
>
> This statement suggests you really don’t know what you’re talking about with regards to AI.
>
> AI doesn’t develop treatments magically. Work needs to be don’t to curate a dataset of treatments and diseases, BUT even then AI can’t create new treatments for existing untreatable cancer as we don’t have any data to go off of.
No one is suggesting it can. AI is very good at pattern-matching. There is a cookbook of techniques here:
1) Create a phage which is very good at injecting into a specific type of cell
2) Create antibodies which can latch onto a specific type of cell, virus, or cancer, so the immune system can attack them
3) Create a vaccine, which is much the same as the above
None of these are hard in of themselves. What is hard is that there isn't a virus called "AIDS" or "flu" or "cold," but a very, very large family of viruses. Ditto for cancer and bacteria. This is the exact type of pattern matching problem ML excels at. Curing a specific virus isn't hard; what's hard is because of all the variations. That kind of adaptation is exactly what ML excels at.
Once covid was sequenced, the actual creation of a vaccine took -- literally -- a couple of days (of work by the world's best scientists). What took much longer was validation, regulatory approval, getting manufacturing up, etc.
> You’re too cavalier in hand waving away the real work by saying things like “AI will do this. Ez. 2 years”
You're attacking a strawman here. Step zero of this process will be:
- Collect a dataset of bacteriophage DNA and of bacteria they're good at attacking (this is a massive undertaking)
- Something very similar with DNA and antigens (much of this exists / has been done, but was a huge undertaking; see "protein folding")
This is a few years in itself. That's when we can start to begin training an AI. There are many other similar-sized steps along the way. "AI will cure cancer" doesn't mean "AI will cure cancer tomorrow." However, I can see all the steps along the way, and no fundamental hurdles.
It's like the Apollo Program or the Manhattan Project on day 1. Yes, it's a major undertaking, but there's every reason t believe it will work. That's exciting.
So far, aside from calling me an idiot, no one in this thread suggested where the flaw in the above lies (and none of the comments suggested the poster had any understanding to do so). I responded to your comment since it was closest.
Cancer is a mutation. Much of the most promising recent work I've read on therapies focuses on:
1) Understanding the specific mutations
2) Helping the immune system find way to identify, and therefore attack, those specific cancer cells
More of the work focuses on t-cells, but otherwise, it's not too dissimilar from the work on infections.
I should know better than to discuss medicine on a SWE forum. Every post here starts with an insult. Not a single post contains any technical detail, nor even clues that people even understand the words I'm using (t-cell, MHC, etc.). It's like arguing with a cross between a five-year-old and a teenager who knows better.
You may be done here, but you are still misunderstanding the medicine. You are making exactly the same errors as mentioned in the article - generalisation.
Cancer is not "a" mutation, and that is the whole problem.
You are talking about personalised neoantigen-specific t-cells as a generic cure for cancer, while ignoring the fact that not all generations of a cancer express neoantigens, or even the same neoantigens.
When we say "She has cancer" we mean "a cancer". (Hopefully she doesn't have all of them!). Why couldn't the sentence "AI will cure cancer" mean "a cancer" as well?