Kurzweil e-newsletter

Kurzweil e-newsletter [view in web browser]( Kurzweil | e-newsletter Welcome to the Kurzweil e-newsletter: accelerating intelligence --- tracking breakthroughs in science, tech, and progress. To see our full library of stories about the world of tomorrow: visit our home page | [click here]( what's new: [op-ed by Ray Kurzweil](http://) Wired | AI-Powered biotech can help deploy a vaccine in record time Simulators that can rapidly test trillions of options would accelerate the slow and costly process of human clinical trials. by Ray Kurzweil The magnitude of the Covid-19 pandemic will largely depend on how quickly safe and effective vaccines and treatments can be developed and tested. Many assume a widely available vaccine is years away, if ever. Others believe that a 12 -to- 18 month development cycle is a given. Our best bet to reduce even that record-breaking timeline is by using artificial intelligence. The problem is twofold: discovering the right set of molecules among billions of possibilities, and then waiting for clinical trials. These processes ordinarily take several years, but AI holds the key to radically shortening both. This is where combining AI with biotechnology is headed, and within several years all vaccine and medication development could be done this way. We can already shorten the development time of a Covid-19 vaccine using this method. Although a human trial of a vaccine or other treatment is regarded as necessary today before widespread use is approved, even large-scale trials are very imperfect, time-consuming, and expensive. A human doctor may come up with a few dozen drugs that may treat a disease. The actual number of theoretical drug possibilities is in the trillions. The current method for testing these few treatments is to organize a few hundred human subjects and then test them over about a year and a half, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Very often, the first several solutions tested on humans are not ideal and lead to other solutions that also take a few years to develop and test. We are literally stuck, watching people succumb to a disease for years while only a few possible solutions are tested. Not much can be advanced until those results are available. We are seeing the beginnings of a profound paradigm shift in health technology. AI simulations have the potential to test all of the trillions of possibilities with tens of thousands of (simulated) patients for a (simulated) period of years, and do all of this in a matter of hours or days. In 2019, for example, researchers at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, created a “turbocharged” flu vaccine in part by using a biology simulator that used AI to find drugs that activate the human immune system. In a matter of weeks it created trillions of chemical compounds, and the researchers used another simulator to see if each compound would be useful as an immune-boosting drug against the disease agent, selecting the ideal formulation. US researchers are now testing this optimized flu vaccine on human subjects. Moreover, in the search for antiviral drugs for Covid-19, Argonne National Laboratory has used five of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to narrow a billion molecules down to a few thousand. Then, with a combination of physics simulations to model the microscopic chemistry and deep learning for pattern recognition, they identified about 30 of the most promising candidates for laboratory study. To fight the coronavirus much more rapidly and effectively, more labs need to use AI to simulate trillions of possibilities, and then use human trials for the most promising ones. These examples mark only the beginning of AI’s contribution to overcoming health problems. Today we can simulate how small molecules interact with certain virtual or human proteins. As these methods take off in the coming years, we will be able to test all trillions of possible solutions to each health problem very quickly. Using neural nets with sufficient computational power will go way beyond what humans can possibly do on their own. Given the exponential nature of progress in this field, I believe that by the end of the decade we will be able realistically model all biology and simulate interventions for diseases without the need for human trials. Amplifying progress in creating new medications for diseases is among the most profound near-term objectives of AI. Such technology will improve medicine for a vast array of diseases, but it will also be enormously valuable when the next pandemic strikes — whenever that happens. It might have a natural origin. It might be a terrorist bio-weapon. It might spread faster than Covid-19, and be 10 or 20 times as lethal. Deploying an effective cure in weeks instead of a year could save tens of millions of lives. — Ray Kurzweil [see this story online]( [artificial intelligence](http://) digest | New AI tool diagnoses Alzheimer's disease with 95% accuracy Artificial intelligence succeeding in medicine --- summary --- A team from Stevens Institute of Technology has developed an artificial intelligence tool that can diagnose Alzheimer’s disease with more than 95 percent accuracy, eliminating the need for expensive scans or in-person testing. [read the full story]( [artificial intelligence](http://) digest | Researchers use AI to model millions of drug combination side-effects Solving this historically complex problem. --- summary --- Millions of people take approx. 5 or more medications a day — but testing the many side-effects of those pharmaceutical drug combinations has historically been difficult. Researchers at Stanford Univ. have invented a way to predict side-effects using computer modeling based-on AI. The team explained that most drug combinations (called poly-pharmacy) have never been systematically studied. Their AI software system — called Decagon — could help physicians make better decisions about what drugs to prescribe. It could also help researchers find better combinations of prescription drugs to treat complex diseases. [read the full story]( [recommended book](http://) book | The Secret Language of Cells What biological conversations tell us about the brain-body connection, the future of medicine, and life itself. by Jon Lieff MD --- summary --- Dear readers, I enjoyed the book The Secret Language of Cells by auhor Jon Lieff MD — it takes us on an exciting journey into a world where we can visualize elaborate conversations among immune cells, brain cells, gut cells, bacteria, and even viruses. Lieff gives a wealth of examples for his thesis that this cellular signaling is the basis of life. It’s a must-read for anyone seeking to understand modern biology and advanced medical science. It’s equally important for those of us who wonder — as I do — how this ubiquitous information transfer in the form of cellular conversations might be related to the emergence of intelligence + consciousness. — Ray Kurzweil [take a look at the book]( [artificial intelligence](http://) making headlines | Investigating the corona-virus pandemic with AI The top stories from around the world. --- summary --- Here’s a collection of the key stories on the web + in broadcast media — on the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) software being used in several ways to take-on the world-wide corona-virus pandemic. The ways AI is being applied: - using computer modeling to discover Rx drugs for treatments + vaccine - analyzing medical lung scans for signs of pneumonia - mining big data to see trends in the pandemic’s spread from person-to-person - tracking mobile devices to trace people spreading the virus - detecting fevers using thermal body scans of people in public places, indicating possible infection [read the full story]( new video | quotes by Ray Kurzweil A new 4-minute video featuring a collection of quotes by Ray Kurzweil and light background music. [watch the video]( the Kurzweil Library | accelerating intelligence by Kurzweil Technologies co. This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update subscription preferences]( Kurzweil Network | accelerating intelligence · 935 Great Plain Ave. | no. 111 · Needham, MA 02492 · USA