It's "one example of AI that we don't have to fear, that we can be really excited about," is how one doctor puts it. He's talking about using AI to pore over existing drugs in search of ones that can be used to treat rare diseases. As the New York Times reports, the success stories are both wild and, in some cases, lifesaving. Consider Joseph Coates, a 37-year-old Washington man who was being ravaged by a rare blood disorder called POEMS syndrome. Too sick for a stem cell transplant and out of options, he was told to decide whether he wanted to spend his final days at home or in the hospital.
In a last-ditch effort to save him, his girlfriend reached out to the University of Pennsylvania's Dr. David Fajgenbaum, whom they'd met at a rare-disease summit. The next morning, he offered a suggestion, prescribing a specific mix of chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and steroids. It worked: Things turned around within a week, Coates was strong enough to get the transplant in four months, and he's currently in remission. The drug combo wasn't Fajgenbaum's brainchild—but Every Cure, a nonprofit set up to use AI to look for new applications for existing drugs, is.
It cross-references 4,000 drugs with 18,500 diseases to find pairings like the suggestion that a patient with Castleman disease use adalimumab, a drug used to treat arthritis, Crohn's disease, and ulcerative colitis. The patient's doctor thought it was unlikely the "wimpy drug" could help the patient, who'd tried chemo, gotten a bone-marrow transplant, and was entering hospice. With nothing to lose, they tried it. The patient was in remission within weeks. (Read the fascinating full article, which notes similar work is being done in other labs around the world, here.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
