What I saw this week
The latest ai, life sciences and innovations impacting patients
Doing a small experiment - sharing various bits of information with relevance to patient outcomes. Let me know in the comments if you find it useful.
Demis Hassabis on AlphaFold, Drug Design, and What’s Next for AI + Biology
"I've worked my whole life on AI because I believe in its incredible potential to advance science & medicine, and improve billions of people's lives. – Demis Hassabis
DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis joined Reid Hoffman to talk about how ai technologies, are reshaping our understanding of disease. AlphaFold is an AI system developed by Google DeepMind that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence. It regularly achieves accuracy competitive with experiment. This will enable faster, more targeted therapeutics.
Why it matters for patients:
This tech can cut years off drug development, especially for rare diseases and cancer subtypes. I’ve known post-docs that spent multiple years literally trying to solve a small part of a single protein’s shape.
Listen to the episode
FDA Approves Shield Blood Test for Colorectal Cancer Screening
Shield is the first blood-based test approved by the FDA for CRC screening, offering a non-invasive alternative to traditional methods like colonoscopy. The test works by detecting circulating tumor DNA in the blood, requiring only a routine blood draw without the need for special preparation.
Why it matters for patients:
This approval aims to improve CRC screening rates by providing a convenient and less invasive option, potentially leading to earlier detection and better patient outcomes.
Operation Oroborous: How Lab-in-the-Loop Turns Patient Data Into Patient Care
Kate Sasser, PhD, CSO at Tempus, explores the continuous cycle of AI-driven insights and biological modeling to improve drug development and healthcare.
Why it matters for patients:
An interconnected “lab-in-a-loop” system—a continuous cycle of real-world data collection, biological modeling, and AI-driven analysis–can accelerate innovation, enable personalized “n-of-1” treatments, and enable patient access.
Read more
Google engineer uses AI to connect scientists around research on a rare disease his son has
When Googler Thomas Wagner’s son received a diagnosis of Alexander disease, a rare genetic disorder, he set out to learn everything he could. He used Gemini to summarize research in medical journals, making it easier for him to understand. He realized there might be similarities between Alexander disease, which had very little active research, and other diseases with much more funding and ongoing research. He began to reach out to those researchers, scientists and doctors, many of whom had never heard of Alexander disease before. Through these conversations, Thomas has helped jumpstart new research into potential treatments.
Why it matters for patients and caregivers:
Gen AI can help “citizen scientists” (patients and caregivers) address seemingly unsolvable rare diseases.
See the video (7 minutes)
Cancer Patient Lab - Weekly Webinar
Guest: Mike Harris (Webinar #136)
Most patients are uninformed about all of it, and it's really hard to get access to the details that those other two parties have. – Mike Harris
What are the challenges that cancer patients and their loved ones face in finding clinical trials?
Urgency: Decisions must be made quickly with an aggressive disease like pancreatic cancer.
Overwhelm: The source of information on available clinical trials dot gov is difficult to navigate and understand, with unstructured text that makes finding relevant trials challenging. With about 13,000 active cancer trials, you can feel overwhelmed and discouraged by the sheer number of options and struggle to parse through trial possibilities and understand how your specific condition matches potential trials.
Why it matters for patients:
The right trial, at the right time, can be life-extending — or life-saving. But if you can't find it, it might as well not exist.
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