Can AI Cure Cancer? 🏥

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Hey fam!

Remember back in the day when movies like iRobot, Transformers, and Star Trek first came out and hinted at the reality that AI would become an integral part of our lives – whether for better or for worse? We don’t know about you, but to us that all seemed far-fetched, until this past year when it feels like AI has rapidly put its fingerprints across pretty much every industry.

🏃Want to create a fitness plan because TikTok workouts aren’t doing it for you anymore? AI can help.

✍️Need to write an essay, but don’t feel like it? Yup, it can do that too.

🍝Looking for a new recipe to try that will impress your friends at your next dinner party? AI the Chef to the rescue.

But this is just scratching the surface. As you may have guessed from the title of this post, AI can do a whole lot more than help you perfect your mac & cheese recipe or tell you the perfect HIIT workout. One industry that’s leveraging this technology in a huge way to solve problems that impact the livelihood of all people? The healthcare industry.

It’s estimated that the AI healthcare market, which was valued at $11 billion in 2021, is expected to be worth upwards of $187 billion by 2030. According to IBM, this means there will be massive changes in how medical providers, hospitals, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and others in the healthcare industry operate. So, this week, we’re talking about all of the ways the healthcare industry is using technology to bring us the best treatments and the best care possible.

How AI is changing the game in Healthcare? 🩺

In plenty of ways. Let’s dive in!

• Efficient healthcare operations: From back-office tasks to patient care, AI can reduce the amount of time physicians spend on mundane tasks such as taking notes and documentation. AI can also be applied to the use of virtual nurse assistants, dosage error reduction, safer surgeries through AI-enabled robots, and fraud detection to recognize unusual activity on insurance claims.

• Improved healthcare user experience: Did you know that 83% of patients expressed poor communication as an area of dissatisfaction when it comes to their healthcare experiences? AI tools such as natural language processing, predictive analytics, and speech recognition hold the potential to enhance communication in healthcare, resulting in improved patient experiences, care quality, and outcomes.

• Increased efficiency in healthcare diagnoses: Harvard's School of Public Health suggests that AI-driven diagnoses, despite being in the early stages, have the potential to cut treatment expenses by 50% and enhance health outcomes by 40%. This technology has the ability to analyze up to a million datasets of medical images and the algorithm is virtually free, only requiring the cost of the hardware.

• Better health monitoring and preventive care: Raise your hand if you have an Apple Watch or another similar fitness tracker. ✋We’re guilty as charged! If you have a watch, you know that Apple is collecting tons of data on us and our activity every second of the day. Eventually, we’ll be able to share these real-time data sets with our doctors to monitor health issues and notify them if there’s a suspected problem.

• Connected disparate healthcare data: AI offers a more efficient way to track patient data compared to human efforts. By using AI and machine learning, healthcare organizations can combine previously disconnected information, providing a more comprehensive overview of patients' health. For example, in the case of diabetes, wearable devices can now offer real-time glucose level feedback, which AI can aggregate, store, analyze, and provide unprecedented insights across a large patient population, ultimately enhancing disease management and treatment strategies.

AI use in the battle against cancer 👊

Believe it or not, AI is not new to healthcare, particularly oncology - the study, treatment, diagnosis and prevention of cancer. In fact, the use of AI in this field dates back to the 1970s, where simple AI algorithms were used to classify cancer and tissue cells. Since then, with the rapid growth of technology, the use of AI in oncology has grown too, helping doctors out in a few ways.

Prediction: Sadly, AI is not a crystal ball for checkups, but it can help doctors see what they can't see, especially in the early stages of cancer when there are no symptoms. By analyzing medical images and data to identify patterns, AI algorithms can create prediction models that help doctors identify people who are at high risk of developing cancer before they even know it.

One example is Sybil, an AI-driven tool developed by researchers at the Mass General Cancer Center and MIT. Using data from the National Lung Screening Trial, Sybil was trained on a deep learning model to analyze scans and predict lung cancer risk for the next one to six years, and it accurately predicted the risk of lung cancer for individuals with or without a significant smoking history!

Detection: Even when symptoms are showing, AI is pretty good at helping doctors confirm their cancer diagnoses, helping detect signs of cancer earlier. For example, AI can accurately predict the Gleason score for prostate cancer, which measures how aggressive the cancer is, and it can identify cancer cells in lymph nodes, helping doctors determine if the cancer has spread. For something that’s usually pretty expensive and time consuming, AI is making it more affordable and accessible to everyone.

In London, Kheiron Medical Technologies is developing AI tools to help radiologists detect early signs of cancer. They train their AI systems on millions of historical medical images labeled by radiologists. The AI then creates a mathematical representation of normal and cancerous images, and uses it to find abnormalities.

In a recent test, Kheiron's AI software matched the performance of human radiologists in reading mammography scans, cut down on radiologists' workloads by 30%, and increased the cancer detection rate by 13%.

Treatment: Ultimately through this accuracy of predicting and detecting, AI can help doctors select the right course of treatment for each patient. AI can use large language models and patient data to find new drug targets, test cancer drugs, develop personalized drugs, improve cancer immunotherapy, monitor tumors, find new biomarkers, and predict patient outcomes.

An example of AI in patient treatment care comes from our friends at Penn Medicine (whoop whoop!). Penn Medicine created Penny, an AI chatbot to help patients manage their medications and track their symptoms. Penny is a text-based, bi-directional, conversational chatbot that helps patients navigate complex chemotherapy regimens and reduce mistakes, and it can accurately interpret medication-related text messages. Through Penny, Penn Med has increased patient engagement for symptom assessment from 25% to 70%.

So… will AI cure cancer? 🤔

It's too early to say for sure.

At the end of the day, AI can help doctors make better decisions by analyzing huge amounts of data to spot patterns and trends that humans would miss. From there, doctors can tailor cancer treatment plans to each patient's unique biology and medical history, and AI can also predict the risk of cancer coming back, and help doctors catch it early when it's most treatable.

But AI isn't perfect. One concern is that AI tools could be biased, reflecting the biases that exist in the data they're trained on. This could lead to AI tools making inaccurate or unfair recommendations. Another concern is that AI tools could detect abnormalities in medical images or other data that aren't actually dangerous. This could lead to unnecessary tests and procedures, which can be costly and stressful for patients.

So, AI is a cool new tool for cancer care, but we need to use it wisely. AI can't take the place of doctors, but it can help them make better decisions.

Company Spotlight: Path AI 🏥

In the spirit of AI 🤝 Healthcare, we’re excited to highlight PathAI! Their mission is to improve patient outcomes with AI-powered pathology. Their platform promises substantial improvements to the accuracy of diagnosis and the efficacy of treatment of diseases like cancer, leveraging modern approaches in machine learning.

Jobs in Web3: Bag Talk 💰

Check out some roles that we recently came across! If you’re feeling inspired by today’s post about AI in healthcare, we added a few roles in the space for you too. Also, don’t be a stranger - let us know what types of roles / companies you’re looking for - let’s secure the bag y’all!

Healthcare & Biotech

• Strategy & Operations Associate at Headway

• Head of Business Operations at Manifold Bio

• Chief of Staff at Mochi Health

Deep Tech Roles

• Operations Associate at Scale AI

• Chief of Staff at Leverage

• Chief of Staff at Imbue

• Head of Finance & Operations at Polygon Labs

• 2024 Winter Internship Program at Harlem Capital

What’s Happening in the News 🗞️

Here’s what caught our attention over the past two weeks:

• Amazon Takes a Big Stake in the A.I. Start-Up Anthropic

• With 95% of NFTs worthless, luxury fashion is finding other uses for web3

• Serena Ventures Backed Brand Boss Beauties Acquires BFF To Shape Web3 Future

Thanks for reading!

— Chad & Kendall