-
Microsoft creator Bill Gates believes AI and gene therapy are both innovations with the best power to transform lives.
-
In a speech delivered at the American Association for the advancement of Science, gates said AI could understand complex biological systems while gene-based tools have the potential to cure AIDS.
-
Committing $100m from Gates and Melinda foundation to address coronavirus, he finds the present technological scenario useful to find a solution in the healthcare industry than it was before.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been working to improve the state of global health through his non-profit foundation for 20 years, and today he told the nation’s premier scientific gathering that advances in artificial intelligence and gene editing could accelerate those improvements exponentially in the coming years.
Gates addressed the public in Seattle during a keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He proposed some powerful benefits of .
“We have an opportunity with the advance of tools like artificial intelligence and gene-based editing technologies to build this new generation of health solutions so that they are available to everyone on the planet. And I’m very excited about this.”
Bill Gates, Co-founder, Microsoft
Such tools promise to have a dramatic , created by the tech guru and his wife in 2000.
When it comes to fighting malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases, for example, CRISPR-Cas9 and other gene-editing tools are being used to change the insects’ genome to make sure that they can’t pass along the parasites that cause those diseases. The Gates Foundation is rapidly through mosquito populations.
Millions more are being spent to find new ways of fighting sickle-cell disease and HIV in humans. Gates said techniques now in development could leapfrog beyond the current state of the art for immunological treatments, which require the costly extraction of cells for genetic engineering, followed by the re-infusion of those modified cells in hopes that they’ll take hold.
For sickle-cell disease, “the vision is to have in-vivo gene-editing techniques, that you just do a single injection using vectors that target and edit these blood-forming cells which are down in the bone marrow, with very high efficiency and very few off-target edits,” Gates said. A similar in-vivo therapy could provide a “functional cure” for HIV patients, he said.
The rapid rise of artificial intelligence gives Gates further cause for hope. He noted that that the computational power available for AI applications has been doubling every 3.5 months on average, dramatically improving on the two-year doubling rate for chip density that’s described by .
One project is using AI to look for links between maternal nutrition and infant birth weight. Other projects focus on measuring the balance of various types of microbes in the human gut, using high-throughput gene sequencing. The gut microbiome is thought to play a role in health issues ranging from digestive problems to autoimmune diseases to neurological conditions.
“This is an area that needed these sequencing tools and the high-scale data processing, including AI, to be able to find the patterns,” Gates said. “There’s just too much going on there if you had to do it, say, with paper and pencil to understand the 100 trillion organisms and a big amount of genetic material there. This is a fantastic application for the latest AI technology.”
Learn more:
Similarly, “organs on a chip” could accelerate the pace of biomedical research without putting human experimental subjects at risk.
The Gates Foundation has backed a number of organ-on-a-chip projects over the years, including one experiment that’s using lymph-node organoids to evaluate the safety and efficacy of vaccines. At least one organ-on-a-chip venture based in the Seattle area, Nortis, has gone commercial thanks in part to Gates’ support.
High-tech health research tends to come at a high cost, but Gates argues that these technologies will eventually drive down the cost of biomedical innovation.
He also argues that funding from governments and nonprofits will have to play a role in the world’s poorer countries, where those who need advanced medical technologies “essentially have no voice in the marketplace.”
“If the solution of the rich country doesn’t scale down then there’s this awful thing where it might never happen,” Gates said during a Q&A with Margaret Hamburg, who chairs the AAAS board of directors.
But if the acceleration of medical technologies does manage to happen around the world, Gates insists that could have repercussions on the world’s other great challenges, including the growing inequality between rich and poor. He says, “Disease is not only a symptom of inequality, but it’s a huge cause.”
Gates also addressed the deadly coronavirus, saying these two .
"Our foundation has committed up to $100 million to address this new coronavirus because we believe it poses a serious threat to global health. This money will support efforts to detect, isolate and treat confirmed cases, help countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia take steps to prepare for the epidemic and protect their most vulnerable citizens, and accelerate the development of vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics."
Bill Gates, Co-founder, Microsoft
As he was speaking, news broke that the first case of coronavirus had been confirmed on the continent, as a person in Egypt tested positive for the disease.
Learn more:
Gates pointed to advances in molecular diagnostic tools as one promising safeguard against such outbreaks. He subscribed to that the world is getting better. “Despite that, there’s plenty to worry about. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that progress has been absolutely phenomenal.”