AI And Quantum TechWill Transform Healthcare And Medical Research

The interconnected development of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced networking, robotics, biotechnology, and related fields has ushered in what I refer to as the Acceleration Era of technological convergence. Healthcare and medical research are the areas where this convergence will have the greatest human impact.

Today, AI is already changing discovery pipelines and clinical workflows. Computing, sensing, and secure communications are examples of quantum technologies that are quickly progressing from laboratory proof-of-concept into early clinical and research applications. When combined, they unlock potential that traditional systems are unable to.

The 21st century is the century of biology, accelerated by physics and artificial intelligence, as I highlighted in a previous Forbes article on future medicine https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckbrooks/2024/10/22/future-medicine-physics-biology-and-ai-will-transform-human-health/

The Human Genome Project was merely the beginning. The workhorses of both health and illness are proteins. The fundamental stages of therapeutic development continue to identify disease-associated proteins, figuring out their structures, locating binders (drug candidates), and testing them.

The number of drug-like small-molecule chemotypes that humans have synthesized is less than 10 million, whereas the theoretical chemical space is in the decillions. This presents challenges for both traditional AI and classical trial-and-error. There is no way to explore using brute force. Instead of discovering truly novel chemistry, pure AI trained on existing data frequently rediscovers variations of known compounds. It has long been computationally difficult to accurately model how a drug molecule interacts with a protein in water using quantum physics.