Many of us have lost loved ones or pets to cancer or had it ourselves. Three stepmothers, an uncle and my father all died of cancer, and some of them didn’t go easy. AI has a number of promises in terms of what it can do. It can drive cars, fly planes, and increasingly supplement or replace us, but it can also solve very difficult problems like a disease that has been very hard to eradicate.
Owkin is developing an AI solution to overcome cancer, and I think it has a great deal of potential. Let’s talk about that potential this week.
Owkin and the Fight to End Cancer
Owkin is an AI company with over $300M in funding and over 300 employees focused primarily on finding a better way to cure a number of health problems, including cancer. Its solution, which is still under development, starts with a deep understanding of each patient’s DNA and RNA. Their process uses cutting-edge causal AI to identify precision therapeutics, de-risking the process so that there are minimal side effects, and uses accelerated clinical trials to develop stronger diagnostics.
Owkin uses advanced AI techniques along with wet lab experiments to accelerate discovery and find innovative ways to use oncology, cardiovascular analysis, and other techniques to identify immunity problems and the causes of inflammation. In addition, Owkin founded MOSAIC, the world’s largest multi-omic spatial atlas for cancer research.
To preserve the privacy of patients and test subjects, Owkin uses federated data to access current multimodal data that unlocks AI’s potential to solve complex medical problems. The company also has a large network of leading academic institutions and medical experts that work to provide and use the massive amounts of information this effort records and indexes.
The AI analysis Owkin is undergoing is based on a model resulting from the collaboration of the world’s best AI and medical experts to constantly improve the model’s capabilities and performance. The result is a medical construct representing the patent that connects the dots on the molecular breakdown of the body in order to identify and analyze the causal links to the diagnosed illness.
The expected result is a molecular-level cure or remedy that is designed to non-invasively address medical problems, including cancer, which have been targeted by this effort.
Game Changer
Our current approach to solving medical problems is fraught with side effects, unintended consequences, and potential outcomes that can appear worse than the disease. Much like we now look at cures from the 1800s and before as barbaric, in the post AI future, I expect we’ll look back at how we are dealing with many of our medical problems as equally barbaric.
This approach is a game changer and potentially could make chemotherapy, which is a process of trying to poison the cancer without killing the host, obsolete. This could also reduce or eliminate dangerous cancer surgeries. Given the remedy is tightly targeted at the problem, the side effects and long recovery time of the various methods to prolong a person’s life should be a thing of the past, and we can instead focus more on ensuring a better life as opposed to just trying to prevent an early death.
Wrapping Up:
Owkin, and companies like it are making a huge difference with AI and how we approach medical care. In the post-AI future, we’ll go in for genetic analysis and then be modified at a molecular level not only to eliminate any medical problems we have, but to optimize our body’s performance and ability to fight future illnesses.
Owkin will be a significant part of that evolution and may be the reason many of us not only survive cancer but have a long, largely uneventful life with a vastly reduced chance of dying of an Illness like cancer.
