Can AI make us feel safer?

Finally, some good news!

I’m very happy to be able to share some positive and exciting news about AI today. A Times article called The Doctors Told Him He Was Going to Die. Then A.I. Saved His Life was published on March 20.

The article is about “drug repurposing,” which is using a drug for something other than it’s original intention (Like Minoxidil, which was developed as a blood pressure medication and was repurposed to treat hair loss.)

Specifically the author is looking at rare diseases and how drug repurposing might help. I didn’t know (or had never considered) the lack of motivation to study rare diseases.

. . .more than 90 percent of rare diseases have no approved treatments, and pharmaceutical giants don’t commit many resources to try to find them. There isn’t typically much money to be made developing a new drug for a small number of patients, said Christine Colvis, who heads drug development partnership programs at NCATS.

That is really depressing. Movies and TV taught me over the years that doctors and scientists want nothing more than to cure a bizarre disease. No one ever told Dr. House to stop diagnosing his patients because the big money was in hair loss.

Dr. Fajgenbaum at the University of Pennsylvania has been repurposing drugs for years. He began by saving his own life after being diagnosed at 25 with a rare form of Castleman disease. Standard treatments didn’t work, so he took matters into his own hands—studying his blood, scouring research, and testing unconventional options. Realizing he couldn’t wait years for a new drug, he tried sirolimus, a generic drug used for kidney transplant patients. It worked and has kept his disease in remission for over ten years.

Here is where AI comes in. It takes time and tons of manpower to search all the side effects and possible uses of the world’s existing drugs.

In 2022, [Fajgenbaum] established a nonprofit called Every Cure, aimed at using machine learning to compare thousands of drugs and diseases all at once . . . [His] platform compares roughly 4,000 drugs against 18,500 diseases. For each disease, pharmaceuticals get a score based on the likelihood of efficacy. Once the predictions are made, a team of researchers combs through them to find promising ideas, then performs lab tests or connects with doctors willing to try the drugs on patients.

Dr. Fajgenbaum with a patient whose life he saved.

Listen to this crazy story!

In Birmingham, Ala., an A.I. model suggested a 19-year-old patient debilitated by chronic vomiting try isopropyl alcohol, inhaled through the nose. “Essentially we ran a query that said, ‘Show us every proposed treatment there has ever been in the history of medicine for nausea,’” said Matt Might, a professor at University of Alabama at Birmingham who leads the institute that developed the model. The alcohol “popped to the top of our list,” Dr. Might said, and “it worked instantly.”

AI is allowing doctors to collaborate in new, unimaginable ways. Although our instinct is to distrust AI, there will be many ways that it will make us feel safer.

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Nailed It!

Still contending with the ol’ “Every woman must look 18” problem. This one was particularly egregious. Please read the description of the image that ChatGPT gave me.

Sure, ChatGPT. Most of us 50 year old women sit around with a cashmere cardigan sexily exposing our lacey boobs. Please note I said nothing about sexiness, lingerie, or OnlyFans in my prompt. This is a woman straight out of the mind of a 13 year old boy.

We have all heard that after you have lived with someone for a long time you might start to dress like them. What if you actually merged into one person? Midjourney seems obsessed with the idea.

The prompt: create the graphic novel image of two people walking on a street in France: a 50 year old man with white hair and glasses, and a 50 year old woman with long wavy red hair and glasses.

I love the images of Roberto with long red hair coming out from under his white hair. It's a midlife mullet!

Lastly, my favorite of the week. I said, “Create the graphic novel image of a 50 year old woman with long wavy red hair and glasses sitting in a kitchen in an apartment in France.”

I got this:

Just for kicks I decided to try it in a classical style. I said,”Change the style to Raphael,” and got this:

Bwahahhhaa. More evidence that Midjourney was created by teenage boys.

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