Our ability to engineer biology will fundamentally transform how we diagnose, treat, and manage disease. Today, modern tools enable us to to program biology with greater precision and sophistication including cells that are engineered to attack cancer. The explosion of “programmable medicines” (in the form of genes, cells, microbes etc) are today leading us closer than ever before to that holy grail of medicine, the cure.

Because these new medicines are engineered systems and programmable in nature, drug discovery and development will move from a generalised non targeted approach to a highly personalised and precise process. We can now move from designing a molecule with limited benefits for a large number of people to designing molecules for specific individuals with 100% impact. Like software upgrades, programmable medicines make it increasingly possible to improve a given medicine in subsequent generations.

All of this is powered by the ability to generate data that we’ve never had before, plus sophisticated computational tools (AI and machine learning) to make sense of them. Biology is incredibly complex —maybe even beyond the ability of the human mind to fully comprehend. AI-powered platforms have the potential to connect dots that have before looked like noise, leveraging massive data pattern recognition, with genomics being the greatest database of all-time.
Generating new discoveries, finding new cures.

This will drive both new therapies and next-generation diagnostics that give us the ability to detect diseases like cancer earlier and earlier, perhaps even stopping disease before it begins. Hence big data, derived from millions of collectivised individuals contributing live streaming anonymised multi-source health data, becomes the basis for cures. Building the infrastructure to enable the creation, hosting and sharing of these assets is the first step in building the road to the promised land of personalised therapeutics.