In your book, you write that big tech companies will revolutionise medicine thanks to AI and data technology. Why will these technologies have such a huge impact on medicine?
Ultimately, these technologies drive every advance in the natural sciences. By this, I mean all technologies related to data management and data science, with AI being the main area. We also see this in medicine – with the Covid vaccine, for example, and the fact that gene therapies are becoming possible. It’s simple: AI and big data will bring about enormous gains in knowledge because they allow us to work with unprecedented amounts of data. In cancer research, for example, it is now possible to sequence the genome of each patient, to decode and analyse their DNA. This is a huge computing task that was unimaginable 10 years ago but can now be done easily.
Which area of medicine do you think will be impacted the most by these technologies?
The greatest progress can be seen in cancer research. Cancer is the second leading cause of death, so a lot of resources have always been dedicated to cancer research. The other two big fields that stand out are gene therapies as well as treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s. But it’s not that easy to pick out a particular field, because there’s a fundamental acceleration going on in all areas. Things can suddenly appear that no one expected.
Will big tech firms determine the future of medicine even more than, say, pharmaceutical companies or healthcare professionals?
No, not directly. Google, for example, is unlikely to become a pharmaceutical company that wants to sell medications. However, these companies provide the technologies that will underpin the medicine of the future. The next major technological advance is quantum computing, which is based on its own special kind of computer science. Quantum computers should become viable in the next four to six years and have a similar impact to AI. Tech companies have a big head start in this area, since these technologies require a lot of computing power and it costs millions to train them. Why would a pharmaceutical company try to set up this kind of infrastructure? I think it’s more likely that companies will buy these services from third parties.
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