🤔 AI is upgrading autoimmune disease research

“Life will find a way.” ― Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

And that way seems to be using AI to do peculiar things. Here’s some you may find interesting.

In today’s newsletter:

• AI is upgrading autoimmune disease research 

• Startup

• Learn

Penses

Back in the day, when I was in the smaller double digits, my mother when through a Michael Crichton audio book phase. A decision that gave an imaginative young kid nightmares but also heavily influenced me into the computational biology field. But reality is nothing like those fiction novels. So alas, I’m not a computational biologist any more.

As reality catches up to fiction, here’s some cool technologies that may interest you:

• According to the NIH, Autoimmune disease impacts 8% of the US population. A team of researchers from Penn State College of Medicine have worked on an algorithm that identifies 26% more genes associated with the illness. They’re currently working to validate finding in a lab. Read more here.

• A different group of researchers, from National Institute of Technology Karnataka in India, used convolutional neural networks (CNN) to classify white blood cells. It’s called the African Buffalo-based Convolutional Neural Model (ABCNM). Funny right? It helps understand the dynamic variations in cell appearance. Read more here.

Startups

I’m not too excited about health tech startups. They all seem like rifts on things people have tired that still don’t improve the cost or access to quality healthcare.

But this happened so I thought I’d mention it. It’s an LLM-based biology startup being compared to the Paypal mafia in some headlines because they supposedly simulate ‘ 500-million years of evolutionary history’.

Whether it turns into nothing but the typical AI startup grift, actually makes some interesting that changes biology as we know it, or turns into a bioweapon enterprise, we’ll see in about 5 -7 years. I know which one I think it is.

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