00:00How much value is there in companies that produce these wearables and companies that do scanning when it comes to
00:05future healthcare prospects and the way that healthcare is going to change?
00:08Well, they're here and now, and we're all using them. I really enjoyed the Neko piece. I have red hair,
00:14green eyes. I'm really well correlated with skin cancer.
00:17So I think what they're doing is bringing the general to the personal. And, you know, that's an important thing.
00:23The value, of course, is in the data, which is what we heard. You need a lot of information to
00:29understand correlations on an individual level.
00:31So I'll give you another example. So I'm a trustee for the Crick Institute in London.
00:35I was there yesterday talking to Charlie Swanton, and he's taken thousands of people and looked at their blood, their
00:43composition of their blood, and asked who's likely to get lung cancer.
00:48So we all know that smoking causes lung cancer, but we don't individually know, will I get it, will you
00:54get it, with somebody who actually smokes more than we do.
00:57We don't smoke, do we? Somebody else will get it. And he's found that there's a signature of just 15
01:02proteins in the blood that will tell you five years before you get lung cancer that you're likely to get
01:10it.
01:10Large number of people, a lot of information, taking the general to the personal. I think that's really, really important.
01:16So where are we in that journey to that more personalised healthcare, then?
01:19We're at the beginning. We're really at the beginning. The value of wearables, as we've heard today, is really in
01:26collecting large amounts of data and then really understanding something about precise measurements,
01:32what it means for the individual and what it might mean for drug development, drug discovery.
01:36We use wearables a lot more in clinical trials now. It allows us to get a lot more information, run
01:43smaller trials, and select the very best patients that go into the clinical trials.
01:48So what we're really doing is using AI at many different places in the drug discovery process and actually coming
01:57up with new hypotheses.
01:58Another example, if you like, one of the companies that we co-founded is called Alkimab, and we've known for
02:05a long time you can make antibodies against yourself that cause disease like rheumatoid arthritis.
02:11But it's also true that you can make protective antibodies, and people haven't looked for that.
02:17So Alkimab have taken on this job of looking at large, large, large numbers of B cells that make antibodies
02:24from many people who are resilient,
02:27protected against the diseases that they really should have based on their genetics and their history,
02:32and found lots of new antibodies that themselves could become drugs.
02:35This is a new use of AI to find new ways of making drugs, new therapies for patients.
02:41That's the real benefit of AI as we think about, as a reminder of all the risks of AI this
02:45week.
02:46And you talked about drug discovery. This is a multi-part process to the R&D to actually getting a
02:51drug on the market.
02:52Which parts of that process get, where do we find efficiencies and get shrunk in terms of time frames?
02:58Where is the impact going to be most salient when it comes to AI and drug discovery?
03:02Well, so AI is making a big difference to drug discovery, and I would say mostly the most important point
03:08is that the hypothesis generation.
03:10So now we understand much more about pathways, pathways in the body, how organs work, how different molecular mechanisms are
03:18involved.
03:19And AI can come up with hypotheses that we wouldn't have thought of as we map the way that cells
03:24and tissues work.
03:25And that allows us to try new things, to identify drugs quicker. That's absolutely a big value of AI.
03:33It used to take many, many cycles of making a molecule, testing it, making another one, testing it, making another
03:39one, testing it.
03:39And actually AI has contracted that a lot. So I think that's a big plus.
03:44Selecting the right patients for clinical trials, understanding whether you've got the biomarkers that really tell you whether the drug
03:53is going to work or not, that's a big plus.
03:56Shorter clinical trials, that's very helpful. Better monitoring, very helpful.
04:00But there are some things that you just will not be able to shortcut in drug development.
04:04So the things that you can't shortcut, safety testing.
04:08If you have to do a six-month safety test, you can't do it in less than six months.
04:12You can't shorten that.
04:13You can't. And clinical trials, if you have to do a six-month clinical trial to show a really good
04:17effect in a patient, you can't do that in less than probably nine months.
04:22So there are some things you just cannot accelerate and you can't shortcut.
04:27And you have to validate the hypothesis, validate the drug's work.
04:30Just very briefly, the UK's role in this.
04:33So the UK is fantastic at science.
04:36We have everything we need, new science, new companies.
04:40We are really good at starting companies.
04:43You know, SV has co-founded lots of companies.
04:45I've done five myself.
04:46So we're very good at that part of it.
04:48I think our challenge still is scale-up.
04:50British Business Bank, British Patient Capital, excellent.
04:53But we need more scale-up funding.
04:55That would be my key point.
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