WASHINGTON: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said artificial intelligence could help eliminate life-threatening diseases, including cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and severe mental illness, within the next decade. Speaking in Washington, he said AI could soon deliver lasting solutions to health problems that have afflicted humanity for centuries.
Amodei said AI will speed up medical research and drug discovery at a pace that is difficult to imagine today. Bringing a new drug to market typically takes decades of discovery and testing, but he said AI is making biological research easier. He expressed hope that diseases such as cancer could become a thing of the past within ten years, which he described as potentially the greatest achievement in human history.
Others in the field share that optimism. Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis have made similar predictions. Hassabis said drug research that takes a decade could be completed in weeks with AI, and he expects precise treatments for nearly all diseases to become available over the next ten years.
Scientists cite DeepMind’s AlphaFold as a leading example. Protein structure is central to how cells function and how diseases develop, and determining a single structure by conventional methods once took months or years. AlphaFold has so far predicted the structures of about 200 million proteins, generating 3D models within minutes. By showing how proteins change when disease occurs, the system has made it easier to design targeted drugs, and Hassabis has called it a major scientific achievement.
Pharmaceutical companies, however, have responded with caution. While acknowledging that AI is accelerating research, they dismiss the notion that diseases such as cancer could be eliminated within ten years as overenthusiasm. Industry experts note that the human body is highly complex and that AI-suggested drugs must still pass clinical trials and regulatory approval before reaching patients. Even so, many observers agree that AI has opened a new era in medicine.