About this video

• Video Title: Possible Ep 96 | Using AI To Discover New Drugs and Save Lives
• Channel: Reid Hoffman
• Speakers: Reid Hoffman, David Fajgen
• Duration: 01:03:50

Overview

This video features a conversation between Reid Hoffman and Dr. David Fajgen, discussing the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in drug discovery and healthcare. Dr. Fajgen shares his personal journey of battling a rare disease, which ignited his passion for finding treatments and led to the co-founding of Every Cure, a nonprofit dedicated to using AI to identify new uses for existing drugs. The discussion highlights the challenges in traditional drug development, the power of drug repurposing, and how AI can accelerate the process of saving lives by analyzing vast datasets to match drugs with diseases.

Key takeaways

• The Unmet Need in Medicine: A significant portion of human diseases lack approved treatments, highlighting a critical gap in healthcare.
• Personal Journey Fuels Innovation: Dr. Fajgen's experience as a patient with a rare disease provided a powerful motivation to find solutions where traditional methods fell short.
• Drug Repurposing as a Solution: Utilizing existing drugs for new indications offers a faster, cheaper, and less toxic alternative to developing entirely new medications.
• AI's Role in Accelerating Discovery: AI platforms can analyze massive amounts of biomedical data to identify potential drug-disease connections, significantly speeding up the research process.
• Every Cure's Mission: This nonprofit leverages AI and human expertise to find new treatments for diseases, aiming to unlock the potential of every medicine for every patient.
• The "Matrix" Platform: Every Cure's AI platform, called "Matrix," quantifies the likelihood of FDA-approved drugs treating human diseases, prioritizing opportunities for patient impact.
• AI Plus Human Collaboration: The process of drug discovery and repurposing relies heavily on the synergy between AI's analytical power and human medical expertise for validation and clinical application.
• The Importance of Transparency and Awareness: Sharing data and raising awareness about potential treatments are crucial for accelerating the adoption of new therapies and helping patients.

The video mentions several diseases and conditions, including:

• Castleman disease
• ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis)
• Lupus
• Lymphoma
• Pulmonary hypertension
• Lamb disease
• Angiosarcoma
• Bachmann-Bup syndrome
• Organ transplant rejection
• Erectile dysfunction
• Grief (in college students)
• Brain cancer
• Tandemysis (a rare neurological condition)
• Rare monogenic neurological conditions
• Autoimmunity
• Cancer
• Lumps and bumps in the neck
• Fluid in the ankles
• Abdominal pain
• Retinal hemorrhage
• Kidney failure
• Bone marrow shutdown
• Liver shutdown
• Toenail fungus

Regarding ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis):

• Dr. Fajgen mentioned ALS as one of the "horrible conditions" that people talked about in grief support meetings, highlighting the suffering associated with it.
• In the context of Every Cure's AI platform, ALS was mentioned as an example of a disease that receives a very "worst" score in terms of unmet medical need.

Regarding Autoimmunity:

• Dr. Fajgen initially hypothesized that he would find repurposed drugs primarily within the categories of autoimmunity and cancer, due to the significant amount of data available for these conditions and the existence of many drugs.
• He later acknowledged that while he expected to find many matches in autoimmunity, his work has also yielded success in other areas, like rare neurological conditions.

The transcript doesn't specifically mention autism or a broad category of "neurodevelopmental disorders" in general. However, it does discuss rare monogenic neurological conditions and specifically Bachmann-Bup syndrome.

Dr. Fajgen noted that he initially thought rare monogenic neurological conditions would be the hardest category to find repurposed drugs for. He described them as genetic conditions where every cell has the same mutation, often involving enzyme deficiencies, leading to severe conditions where children are bedridden. He also highlighted Bachmann-Bup syndrome as an example of such a rare neurological condition for which they identified a potential repurposed drug (DFMO).