What We Tell Our Kids About AI
What is changing is not simply the tools available to help us make predictions about human biology. It is the speed of the discovery process itself: propose an idea, build it, test it in the physical world, learn from what happened, and begin again. The scientific method itself is beginning to accelerate, and the number of scientific inquiries, opportunities to advance health per dollar spent, is beginning to scale.
Last month, Merck and Moderna reported that a personalized cancer vaccine for melanoma significantly delayed the disease from spreading. The result is remarkable on its own, and studies are already underway in other settings. What we find particularly exciting is how this growing clinical evidence, combined with AI tools and automated labs, can open the field to more competitors. The evidence reduces uncertainty about the approach, while these tools can lower the cost and time required to pursue it. Together, they can bring more teams and more capital into our fight against cancer and expand the number of promising ideas that will be tested at an unprecedented rate.