Could AI really cure cancer?
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Hi, I'm Patricia Carvallis, the host of the Politics Now podcast. And navigating what our rapidly changing world means can be tricky.
I do think you're right to point to the ability of the backbench in Britain to agitate, be upset with Keir Starmer. That's one of the reasons he's gone.
That's why I'm joined by the sharpest political minds at the ABC to break down what each development means for Australia and how the government is positioning.
Albanese has got a much more compliant backbench and he's got much more dominance of the parliament just because of peculiar Australian features of our system.
That's politics now with me, Patricia Carvallis. Find it on ABC Listen.
We're being warned that AI could wipe out humanity. But some of the very same experts sounding the alarm are also predicting AI will help cure cancer within the next decade. So how will these competing visions of destruction and salvation play out? And is a cure for cancer really within AI's reach? Today, Dr. and researcher Emilia Jaworski joins us to separate the reality from the hype. I'm Melissa Clark on Gadigoland in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.
I believe that as this technology progresses, we will see diseases get cured at an unprecedented rate.
We look at these tough diseases like cancer, like Alzheimer's. I just think AI is the right thing to cure them.
I believe in our lifetime AI will help cure cancer. The strategy is to
help scientists and the scientific community cure all diseases. The end of disease? I think that's within reach. Maybe within the next decade or so. I don't see why not.
Amelia, what do you think when you hear some of the promises from tech executives about the potential for AI to cure cancer? Does it excite you or or does it make you wary?
Can you hear those claims? It makes me reflect on the promises we've heard in the past, because promises from Silicon Valley that we are going to have a healthcare revolution and cure disease are actually not new. There's a long history here, going all the way back. To we think of systems like IBM Watson, which was the AI system that was really great at Jeopardy, and they tried to bring it to healthcare, and it turned out to be very not good at curing patients. We've heard Tim Cook from Apple say things like, you know, Apple's legacy is going to be a healthcare revolution that was in 2019, yet to see that materialize. And then really going all the way back to twenty thirteen, there was this movement that started that was called the tech bio movement.
And this was taking biotech but reversing it to make sure you knew the tech part was really important. And this was the first wave of companies that were using AI for drug discovery. And there was a lot of promise that AI was going to be able to discover new drugs, it was going to transform care. Yet here we are 13 years later, and we still don't have in the US at least a single FDA-approved drug that has been discovered with AI.
So there's a long history here, so I I guess that definitely informs how we look at some of the claims that are being made. But Amelia, before we dive into your paper on all the ways AI can and can't cure cancer, first can we just take a look inside a a cancer tumour? Can you just help us understand what is cancer and and why we haven't found a cure for it yet?
Yeah, when we talk about cancer, we talk about it as if it's one thing, right? A cure for cancer, one cure, one cancer. But cancer is actually thousands of different diseases that are highly personalized. Each of those sort of variants of cancer have their own drivers and their own mutations. So if you looked at a cancer tumor and zoomed in, you would find even within single tumor, different cells have different types of mutations that are driving that cancer. So it's something that is much, much more complex than a single disease, which is often how we think about it. Cancer is complex, it's adaptive, it responds to treatment, it's really a moving target, not a fixed target.
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