"Pharmaficial" Intelligence: Could Science Fiction Become A Pharma Reality?

By Anna Rose Welch, Editorial & Community Director, Advancing RNA

I recently went to see Disney’s latest film, Big Hero 6. Like a lot of Disney movies, it depicts a world filled with creative inventions, and promotes the inspirational motto “try, try again” in the face of failure (a familiar phrase to the ever-innovating pharma industry). But it also depicts a futuristic vision of where the pharma industry could be headed as treatment and technology become more closely tied in the quest for patient centricity and improved quality of life.

One of the main characters of the film is Baymax, the giant inflatable personal healthcare robot. All it takes is the word “Ow!” and Baymax inflates, performs a full body scan, issues a diagnosis, and provides treatment.  Designed to be “non-threatening and huggable,” Baymax only deflates once the patient says they are satisfied with his or her care — a patient-centric robot, if I do say so myself.  

While Baymax hasn’t hit the real market, all the buzz about wearable technology and the convergence of Google and pharma this past year has made me think about where technology is carrying our industry. There were a couple of new partnerships and projects launched in the past year that have stuck with me:

• Last summer, Novartis licensed Google’s “smart lens” technology to create “smart” contact lenses that could read diabetes patients’ glucose levels in tears. The project is also searching for solutions for presbyopia — an age related condition that results in the inability to see objects close up.
• AbbVie also jumped on the Google bandwagon by signing a deal with Google’s new health company, Calico. Under the terms of the deal, Calico will be launching several new R&D facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area to develop treatments for age-related illnesses.
• Google has also stepped up to the plate to create a wearable device that, with the help of nanotechnology, could detect cancer in the body. According to a recent TechCrunch article, the Google[X] lab is creating a pill made up of programmed particles that have been “magnetized” with antibodies. When swallowed, these particles spread through the body and catch on the abnormal cells.
• A new type of software is being developed at Duke University that could be the answer to antibiotic resistance. This software is designed to predict how certain bacteria will mutate — knowledge that could help researchers modify drugs still in development or identify which therapies might not be beneficial in the long-run.

I also recently ran across an article in New York Magazine focused on the work of Martine Rothblatt, the CEO of United Therapeutics. Rothblatt is known for launching an organization known as Terasem, which is focused on establishing “cyber-consciousness” through cryogenics and AI. Technology has no doubt opened up a world of new possibilities for streamlining clinical trials, drug discovery and development, and has enabled the patient to take a greater hand in their own health (i.e. social media, fitness apps, etc.). However, as the title of Rothblatt’s recent book, Virtually Human: The Promise — And The Peril — Of Digital Immortality, suggests, technology could also one day bring us all immortality.

According to the NY Magazine article, technologists today are fixated on the concept of intelligent gadgets that will one day not only interact with one another but could “cross the threshold into the body and transform the human organism itself.” In fact, Rothblatt entertains visions of a future in which the human body contains “millions of nano-robots…directed wirelessly, cleaning up impurities and attending to diseases at the cellular level.” 

The Director of Engineering at Google, Ray Kurzweil, has been a big proponent of AI and has gone so far to say that by 2029 — a mere 15 years — we will have successfully created human-level AI. He points out that the pharma industry is already using lower forms of AI to diagnose diseases and develop treatments.  

However, all this has left me to wonder, if technology becomes the ultimate cure to disease, what shape will the pharma industry take? What is the likelihood we will find ourselves in a world not unlike that imagined by Disney, being tended to by our own personal healthcare robot — or better yet, by innovations contained in our own bodies?