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This kind of thing is why I'm finding the current tizzy over AI doom so hard to believe. Because the same companies that are dressing up in the robes of Cassandra and crying "Doom, doom, unless there is a pause!" are...
... building biolabs for Claude to frolic and play in, doing research (to cure all human ills, of course!)
Gosh, it is so reassuring that Dario Amodei isn't doing anything to hasten the chances that AI will create some kind of bioweapon to kill off humans, like the doomers fear!
Do you see why people think all these calls for a pause are only some kind of scam by the big companies to get regulations passed that will favour them and copper-fasten their positions as the only sources for AI in general?
The promise of AI from the beginning has been 'Cure cancer (and all other diseases).' Oh, and immortality too.
How was that supposed to happen without a wet lab? I guess you could try your hand at improving existing in silico simulations, but even that would take a lot of wet lab benchmarking and at the moment SOTA is nowhere near sufficient along several axes.
That being said, I've chatted with people who have an idea of the projects they're going after and the ambition is several OOM less ambitious than curing cancer and pretty far from GoF research. Dario specifically cites rare diseases in the article so it's probably in the vein of 'Millennium problem, but for biology' so they can get press along the lines of 'ANTHROPIC DISCOVERS NEW DISEASE AND CURES PATIENTS.' Which would hype investors and e/acc types, but be meaningless as far as having any kind of impact on people's lives.
5 years from now? Who knows. Maybe I'll at least learn the definitive answers to all the questions I studied in grad school before I get turbo-COVID.
Fair disclaimer; the links and exerts were from an effortpost I put together(but never posted), and when I went back later to double-check some information, found that the article was now behind a paywall. Of cource. I hate this fucking timeline.
So if you don't believe any of said exerts and call me a filthy fucking liar, the most I can do is shrug, cause I don't really blame you.
Solving cancer via LLMs and mRNA vaccines is already done and established science.
Kinda.
In dogs.
Now, we all know about mRNA vaccines(cough cough Covid cough cough), and while their efficacy is... I'm sure, debatable and contentious. But in this specific instance, it at least had results;
Again, not a magic cure-all or panacea, but sometimes you have to appreciate that the pig can dance at all.
However, turns out you don't need LLMs at all;
(Emphasis both removed and added from the original.)
And, even better;
(Emphasis added.)
Note: I am unable to check the twitter links for the above, as my account for twitter has been locked out barring cell phone verification, so I cannot confirm they work or link to what they say anymore.
I hate this fucking timeline.
So, mRNA cancer solutions are already a thing, but we can't have them, for reasons, I guess.
So the real question we should be asking isn't 'Can we do this', cause we already do. The question should be 'Do we trust Anthropic not to fuck things up' and I think I know what my answer is.
Starting with the mouse/tweet from Patrick Heizer first:
Mouse models in cancer are a very contrived system (with varying levels of contrivedness). Human tumors evolve over months/years while exposed to selective pressures from the immune system and other defenses against cancerous cells. They recruit immunosuppressive cells, their own blood supply and dense fibrous tissue to shield themselves from the rest of the body and ultimately metastasize. They're extremely genetically heterogeneous. And the mice have robust immune systems and are otherwise healthy, whereas human cancer patients skew old, they're often blasted with chemo or otherwise sick, etc. I'm not a cancer biologist, but I'm sure an LLM could do a better job listing all the differences.
The most basic murine tumor models just involve injecting them with a single genetically homogenous cancer cell line which lacks all of the features mentioned above. Trivially easy to clear, and most of the reddit-tier hype articles are just showing 3rd tier journals with results of this type.
Genetic murine tumor models and patient-derived xenografts are both big improvements, but still have various deficiencies compared to the above. And even in these models, we often advance clinical candidates that only delay death in the mice.
Lastly, the types of cancers you can target with immunotherapy (your mRNA vaccines) are limited. There's a spectrum of # of mutations in a given cancer, and melanoma is at the high end given that it's usually caused by UV irradiation. That's why the initial PD-1 and more recent Moderna data were both done in melanoma.
That's what we'd call and objective response. And that's great! But traditional chemos also have pretty robust objective response rates. The main readouts in most of these cancer trials is progression-free survival (PFS) or overall survival (OS). Lots of therapies can generate ORs; the vast majority are not cures.
The other thing worth keeping in mind is that these personalized vaccines are going to cost a bajillion dollars. I guarantee that when Moderna prices their cancer vaccine and it hits the news, we're going to get a spate of news articles hyping it and pharma squeezing desperate sick patients. CAR-T therapy costs 0.5-1 million dollars, and companies are still losing money doing it. There's probably an argument for relaxing stringency of the manufactured product (a large part of why it's so expensive), but relaxing regulation on big pharma is generally a losing argument to the public.
Manufacturing the mRNA vaccines won't be as bad, but making a single dose is going to involve the clinicians taking a biopsy, running the clinical-grade sequencing, paying the bioinformaticians to search for epitopes, some time-sensitive safety testing run by clinical-grade lab grunts and probably half a dozen other things I'm forgetting.
A cure for cancer is going to involve some new treatment modality or paradigm. I'm interested to see what the swarm comes up with.
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