1. Where’s the Proof?
We’ve heard the hype. Now comes the test. The “definitive” moment has arrived for AI to show whether it can “deliver drugs that actually work at scale.” Dr. Raminderpal Singh, an AI expert working in the life sciences, argues we’ve reached the moment of proof:
The most advanced AI-designed drugs are entering pivotal trials, with multiple clinical readouts expected throughout the year. Several major merged entities anticipate numerous clinical readouts over the next 18 months. These results will provide the first large-scale test of whether AI improves clinical success rates beyond the pharmaceutical industry’s persistent ~90 percent failure rate. Positive Phase III data could validate physics-enabled AI design for specific targets, potentially enabling regulatory submissions and approval timelines extending into 2027. However, additional clinical failures remain statistically likely given historical attrition rates.
2. Here’s the Proof
While pharma, techies, and regulators await the Ph3 readouts, an amateur in Australia worked like a dog on his own AI-enabled custom mRNA vaccine… for his rescue pooch. His dog had cancer. No treatments were working. So he went to ChatGPT:
It compressed months of literature review into hours. It suggested genomic sequencing, walked him through neoantigen identification, helped him build a research pipeline that would normally require a postdoc and a lab budget. He paid $3,000 to sequence Rosie’s tumor DNA at UNSW’s Ramaciotti Centre, then ran the mutations through AlphaFold to model the protein structures. A computational biology professor at UNSW saw his analysis and was, in his own words, gobsmacked that someone with zero biology training had assembled the whole thing.
The hardest part? “Australian ethics approval to run a drug trial on your own pet took three months. Two hours every night after work, filling out a 100-page application. The red tape was harder than designing the vaccine.”
3. Longing for Longevity
Investors are eyeing new unicorns: rejuvenation companies. A recent FDA approval gives the green light to Life Biosciences to “try to treat eye disease with a radical rejuvenation concept called ‘reprogramming.’” According to MIT Technology Review:
The technique attempts to restore cells to a healthier state by broadly resetting their epigenetic controls—switches on our genes that determine which are turned on and off….“Reprogramming is like the AI of the bio world. It’s the thing everyone is funding,” says Karl Pfleger, an investor who backs a smaller UK startup, Shift Bioscience.
4. Here Comes the Sum
Are big pharma deals back? Following the JPMorgan healthcare conference in January, the FT assesses where the industry is headed. Consolidation is coming:
A more favourable antitrust environment means Big Pharma could turn up the dial on bigger takeovers, after last year produced four deals worth more than $10bn. “Under the previous administration, Big Pharma doing a big deal provoked knee-jerk scrutiny,” said Jenny Hochenberg, a partner at Freshfields. “People are a lot less anxious about scrutiny over big deals.” All the talk of bigger deals has even increased speculation that the first Big Pharma consolidation wave in more than a decade could be just around the corner.
5. Too Much of a Good Thing
Note to aspiring psychotherapists: don’t drop out of school just yet. Even if AI can get to the point where it perfectly mimics an IRL psychotherapist, there’s a problem. The AI doc will be too available. One professional makes a case for scarcity of service:
The basic idea of therapy is not to make you dependent for life—but rather, to equip you to live more skillfully and with greater self-awareness. As integration specialists famously say of psychedelics, you can only incorporate so much insight, and practice skills so effectively, without the chance to digest what you’ve learned over time.
In other words, even in good old talk therapy, drinking from the hose without breaks for practice and introspection in a more organic context risks drowning out the chance for real change and practical insight. To my mind, this rhythm is the basic structural genius of psychotherapy as we know it—no matter the modality, no matter the diagnosis.