Researchers may have come up with an interesting new treatment for cancer by talking to AI. According to a paper published this month, a research team led by the University of Cambridge turned to an “AI scientist” powered by GPT-4 to help create a new AI-designed cancer treatment plan. The kicker? It only uses widely available drugs that have nothing to do with treating cancer.
The researchers started by taking all of the data they had regarding popular drugs used to treat high cholesterol and alcohol dependence to look for hidden patterns that could point toward new cancer drug options. They prompted GPT-4 to identify combinations of the drugs that could possibly have a significant impact on breast cancer cells.
The result is a new AI-designed cancer treatment plan that avoids standard cancer drugs and relies on drugs that will not target non-cancerous cells. The drugs that the AI was prompted to look for were also meant to be widely available, affordable, and already approved by regulators.
Considering how many different types of cancer treatment options we’ve seen in recent years, this approach makes a lot of sense. It also opened some new doors, according to the researcher’s findings, which are published in the Journal of Royal Society Interface.
We’ve seen a huge increase in researchers and doctors turning to AI to try to come up with new treatment options for old problems, including an AI that can identify autism. So it isn’t that surprising to see researchers once more turning to AI to help speed up scientific progress. It seems to have worked, too.
According to the findings, the researchers tested the combinations suggested by the GPT-4 “scientist” and found that three of the 12 combinations worked better than current breast cancer drugs. They then fed that information back to the AI, which created four more combinations, three of which also showed a lot of promise.
Of course, relying wholly on AI-designed cancer treatment plans isn’t something doctors are likely to do immediately. More trials and research are needed to fully test the efficiency of these drug combinations. Testing will also need to be done to ensure there aren’t any adverse side effects from combining these drugs over extended periods of time.
But for those fighting cancer right now, research like this is promising and could one day help scientists find even better treatment options. And even if the AI hallucinates, the information it gives may spark a new idea that scientists hadn’t thought of before.
AI will never replace doctors, no matter how hard Google and others push for a future involving AI doctors. But by relying on AI to speed up research, scientists can potentially unlock new options they might not otherwise find for decades to come.
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