Back to the future: AI is about to change the world of medicine

My first crush, back in the eighties, was the prince of “Family Ties” and “Back to the Future”, a boy with a sly smile, a fluttering skateboard and a skateboard. Yes, yes, Michael J. Fox. As much as I loved him, I had a fat notebook where pictures of him were pasted, and even in the golden heart pendant at the end of my chain, his squishy picture was hidden. And I can’t help but think of him when I sit in my chair at the biotech conference organized by the biotechnology company Cellular Intelligence In Copenhagen, right after the announcement that the pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk (Wigoby and Ozpic, you know?) has acquired the global rights to a cellular therapy program for Parkinson’s disease.

As part of the agreement, Cellular Intelligence is supposed to work to promote the continued clinical development of the program, with the aim of developing a significant treatment that may affect the course of the disease for people living with Parkinson’s, who apart from Michael J. Fox (did you see him in the last season of “Shrinking” meets Harrison Ford at the Parkinson’s clinic? Perfect) suffer from it, not only from motor failures, by the way, but also from less talked about disorders such as the condition the wind And what exactly does this treatment mean? That’s what we’re here for.

When the CEO of the company, Dr. Micah Braxton, opens the conference, he tells about the reasons that led him to this very place, and about his grandfather, who died of Parkinson’s. “There are much faster and easier ways to get to money and fame,” he jokes, and he knows what he’s talking about, because before he hired professors from Harvard and the University of Washington, he founded Chorus.ai which was purchased for 575 million dollars. In any case, he is followed one by one by a host of researchers who talk about the latest developments in the field of stem cells, which are used today to create human models of diseases in the laboratory, to test the effects of drugs and to study disease mechanisms precisely. Terms like “alpha fold” and “microglia” are thrown around quite a bit, and it seems that there is a sensational progress not only in the field of Parkinson’s, but also in blindness, heart failure, oncology and diabetes, and listen, we have seen amazing transparencies of areas in the brain of dead cells, which after one injection in which programmed stem cells are injected have been resurrected. Blind people who began to see, diabetics whose bodies produced insulin again, epileptics who no longer suffer from seizures and mice with dementia who remembered again. It’s so amazing that you want to shout at them, come on, go back to the lab and work, don’t waste time on anything else.

In the treatment promoted by cellular intelligence for Parkinson’s, I will try to simplify, stem cells are programmed to become dopamine-producing neurons and injected into the brain, with the goal that they will integrate there, produce dopamine and replace the lost cells. And what is special here is the platformAI-native theirs which speeds up the whole process. The treatment is currently in the first clinical trial in humans, in phase 1/2. The program received from theFDA status Fast Track and confirmation IND for further clinical development. Will I get to see Michael J. Fox filming “Back to the Future” without the symptoms of the disease? You never know, but there seems to be such a chance. i hope

“Parkinson’s is a disease in which the specific cells that are responsible for fine movement die, and our cure is to restore these cells, which are the ultimate medicine, nature’s perfect medicine for degenerative diseases, like a biblical miracle,” Braxton tries to explain to me between lectures, saying about the connection to Novo Nordisk “We were in the right place at the right time. The combination of artificial intelligence and the ability to move quickly gave us an overwhelming advantage. If I could have imagined the most optimistic scenario for us a year ago, it would have been this. If there’s one message I’d like to convey, it’s that yes, artificial intelligence is going to hopefully significantly improve the amazing drug we purchased from Novo Nordisk, and I think the reason they chose us is our ability to do that, and make its chances of success higher not only clinically but also commercially, and that’s why it’s a wonderful deal.”

Cellular Intelligence, located in Boston, has about 70 people, about 15 software and artificial intelligence people and the rest are biology people. And the treatment itself, in his words, is an injection of cells, a minor operation performed by a neurosurgeon. “This is a relatively simple procedure,” he says, “the cells are injected into the specific area of ​​the brain, where they settle, assimilate and grow, and then begin to secrete dopamine – which is the miracle.”

 

I think that in the next 15 years there will be new types of drugs, regenerative drugs, drugs that are currently like miracles, I am convinced of this, people who could not see will be able to see, people who could not hear will be able to hear, people who could not walk will be able to walk”

Dr. Micah Braxton, founder of Cellular Intelligence

How does the computer come into the picture here? What can he tell us?

“A fertilized egg from a cell becomes 35 trillion cells of different types. Each such cell, when a certain substance is added to it, becomes a kidney cell, another substance – it becomes an eye cell or a skin cell. It turns out that if you give a certain substance but a little longer or less time – the quality of the cell changes, that is, how long it stays alive, what is the chance of the cell to take root, how much dopamine can it secrete, and so on. All these parameters change the cell’s profile, and what we know how to do With artificial intelligence it’s learning the connection – what messages the cell receives, and we learn how to make a cell that will take root better and produce more dopamine. They have a language, they talk to each other and send each other messages.

It’s very philosophical, reminds me of Alan Watts, the philosopher, who said that we try to look at ourselves from the outside, as if we were a machine that needed to be tuned, Instead of understanding that we are part of the experience itself and not outside of it. Do you sometimes think about the philosophy behind it?

“Of course, of course.” Braxton opens the phone to read a text he wrote that talks about exactly that. “In the past year since I founded the company, it has become more and more clear to me that humans communicate with each other a bit like cells,” he reads, “Each of us is on our own mission, to nourish, grow, divide, thrive, vaccinate, and sometimes even kill and become malignant, and all this without realizing that we are part of a much larger organism. Some people use force, some people use justifications to signal things they don’t necessarily understand, others have mechanisms. of self-destruction that go into action too early, and there are those who are simply benevolent and want to build, and I call them pluripotent stem cells. When we look at humans as part of a wider organism, things start to work out and become understandable. Just as there is no real meaning to understanding the behavior of a cell without the context of the tissue, the organ, or even the entire organism,” he concludes.

And what is the greatest danger inAI in biology? After all, there is a line between curing a disease and programming our lives.

“There are a million dangers in everything, this is not a limit that one of the companies even approaches, there are so many diseases that can be treated by a deep understanding of the disease, we do not understand medicine, that’s the truth, we are in such early stages of it, the body is such a complex system that the road is still long.”

Do you think that in 15 years let’s say the medicines will change? That the old drugs will no longer be relevant?

“That’s a bit of a strong statement, I think that in the next 15 years there will be new types of drugs, regenerative drugs, drugs that are currently like miracles, yes, I’m convinced of that, people who couldn’t see will be able to see, people who couldn’t hear will be able to hear, people who couldn’t walk will be able to walk.”

You asked one of the participants of the conference what his most non-trivial prediction was for the next decade, what would you say?

“I think that with a little luck in 15 years we will be able to produce cells that are more resistant, able to produce more of the substance they are supposed to produce, let’s say beta cells that secrete insulin or cells that secrete dopamine. We will be able to produce more optimal cells for a specific role.”

And the treatment will be accessible not only to Putin?

“Like any technology, it happens slowly and then all at once. The lowering of costs thanks to theAI is the production of the information, but it depends on other things, to do all these things you need to train a model, for that you need information, and for that you need to produce it – we need to learn the language of cells. Human language is no problem to learn, but to understand the language of cells you have to learn their internal grammar – if philosophy, then Grossman.”

And you can’t with a little Israel. Neighbor DR. Braxton, who lives with his wife, daughters and golden dog in Austin, is our enthusiastic ambassador, and after October 7 he also decided that he wanted to return to Israel. “I see what I do as a national mission,” he says. “It is important for me to say that I am Israeli, three of the founders of the current company are Israeli, most of the artificial intelligence people are Israeli, and quite a few of the biologists are also. It is important to me that my daughters grow up in a place where they belong, if there is a place to return to, to democracy.”

According to him, he thinks of entrepreneurship as a type of pioneering and supports many entrepreneurs, also financially. “As many edge entrepreneurs succeed – it will elevate Israel and perhaps give us hope after the nightmare of the last three years. I truly believe that this is the pioneering, what, we’re going to drain swamps? It’s less desirable these days,” he concludes. artist.

* The reporter was a guest of the Cellular Intelligence company at the conference