Could AI potentially come up with cures/treatments for diseases such as cancer?

Question: Could AI potentially come up with cures/treatments for diseases such as cancer?
- Keywords:
  artificial intelligence,
  cancer,
  cure,
  disease
Asked by anon-372347 on 8 Jan 2024.
- Andrew Maynard answered on 8 Jan 2024:
  
  Absolutely — although cancer is such a complex disease that treatments are more likely than cures. We’re already finding that scientists working with AI can discover potentially molecules that people alone haven’t been able to discover, and there’s no reason why this type of ability could not lead to treatments and even cures that humans alone couldn’t find.
  
  It may also be that AI working with scientists leads to new understandings of cancer — which still isn’;t understood as well as we’d like
- Beatriz Costa Gomes answered on 8 Jan 2024:
  
  Yes! When used as a tool, it can definitely unlock a lot of science that was out of reach. For example, by predicting new molecules or proteins that we couldn’t predict before, we can try and understand their relationships with cells, and target cancer treatments that way. There is also the work of creating digital twins of people so we can study the effects of the treatments without putting the patient in danger!
  
  Besides, AI can help with earlier diagnosis of diseases in some cases, which makes the existing treatments a lot more effective!
- Muhammad Malik answered on 8 Jan 2024:
  
  Well I would say Yes, AI has the potential to help find cures or treatments for diseases like cancer.With AI we can analyze lots of data (huge amounts of data) and patterns quickly, which can be really useful for scientists, researchers and doctors. It can help us discover new ways to fight diseases and improve our chances of finding better treatments…
- Alexander Coles answered on 8 Jan 2024:
  
  AI can not come up with cures and treatments on its own. First it requires data, lots of this data will have to have been organised and created by doctors from previous experiments. There are some projects using the characteristics of previous drugs to propose new drugs that may act in a similar way which may help treat cancer. However most work in AI and cancer is on helping Doctors diagnose and treat patients better which may cure patients cancers but will most likely allow patients to live longer .
- Mohan Sridharan answered on 9 Jan 2024:
  
  AI can definitely play a role in developing cures/treatments for diseases. In fact, there is already considerable work in using AI methods for a wide range of applications in medicine and healthcare, e.g., in automated disease identification and drug discovery.
- Rosemary J Thomas answered on 9 Jan 2024:
  
  AI can be used for many things, such as helping doctors diagnose diseases such as cancer. AI can help doctors to find out if someone is sick or not, by looking at pictures of their body parts, such as their skin, lungs, or blood. AI can also help doctors to choose the best treatment for the sick person, by learning from the data of other people who had the same disease and got better. AI can help doctors to save more lives and make people healthier.
- Sheridan Williams answered on 9 Jan 2024:
  
  Yes. It does this by fine-tuning information already known, discarding irrelevant material and narrowing down the options. Humans do this but AI can do it billions of times faster.
  Humans will always be better at ‘original’ thought though in my opinion. At present I can’t imagine AI coming up with a completely brand new theory (e.g. Einstein’s relativity). I’m probably wrong though!
- Fraser Smith answered on 9 Jan 2024:
  
  yes I think it will be able to in the future – it is already being used to study the structure of proteins in depth – which is a super important area for developing new drug treatments. It can work way faster than humans on the same problem.
- Kevin Tsang answered on 9 Jan 2024:
  
  AI could certainly help speed up drug discovery, including for diseases like cancer. The idea is that by having an AI process lots of past results of how chemicals react, it can predict how new chemicals might react, so human experts can focus on the most promising chemicals. A related example of an AI is DeepMind’s Alpha Fold (still in the research stage and not yet used in clinical drug discovery), which has helped us develop a greater understanding of protein folding, a concept that determines the potential effects of a drug.
- Luke Humphrey answered on 9 Jan 2024:
  
  I’d say yes, depending on what you mean by “come up with”. There are many ways which AI tools can be used to support any kind of research, including medical, but it does require people to use those tools correctly.
  
  For example, it won’t be that we keep iterating on a language model like chatGPT and then it will suddenly be able to tell us things that weren’t already known beforehand. At their heart, AI techniques are built on data science so the data is key.
  
  In theory (and far in the future), I think we could automate the whole process. In effect, we could have AI to decide what research is most useful which talks to other AI to do that research and other AI to make sense of the results.
  
  I think it would be very easy for such a system to be abused to favour some people more than others though, so it’s worth asking if that’s even something we’d want to do. For now, anyway, people are still very much involved and AI are tools for certain computational tasks.
- Vian Bakir answered on 9 Jan 2024:
  
  I really hope so. This is the big promise, after all.
- Mackenzie Jorgensen answered on 9 Jan 2024:
  
  AI could potentially help yes! Drug discovery is one avenue for this that is especially promising in the medical field.