Lab-in-the-Loop: AI bridges to the wet lab

Can you explain why? Why? Because, you know, I think, okay, so that could be an entire podcast on this topic.

But, you know, when people talk about having a mission when you work in something, you know, like I cannot think about other industry where there is a more important mission than in life science in general and in pharmaceutical industry, because in the end, we're developing drugs, you know, we're developing drugs or patient.

And I always, I start most of my talk like that.

I say, you know, there are something like 24,000 known diseases.

14,000 are rare disease.

We have between 3,000 and 4,000, 5,000 drugs on the market.

But those drugs are not for 5,000 disease.

They are for far less because you have maybe 10 drugs against the same indication.

And then from those 4,000 or 5,000, you have maybe 200 to 300 that are actually curing the disease.

Every year, there is 50 new drugs that go through regulatory approval.

So if we go at this pace, we need another 500 years until we cure all diseases.

Yeah, good statistics.

I would be before we dig into the AI field, and we're extremely interested in that.

But at the same time, when you mentioned this, and I have to ask this question, we're at the crossroads where healthcare systems are... on the edge, where the question, the basic question is, how on earth are we going to pay for this in the future? And at the same time, you have this revolution that is going on with new findings, new drug development, quicker drug developments, probably drug development under a billion euro per drug.

But those crossroads exist.

And we have to ask ourselves the question, where do we want to be headed with this?

Yeah, I think there are multiple ways of looking at this problem.

So I think, first of all, I agree with you.

If we just continue to do the things the way we do, it's not going to work.

Plus, we are getting a lot of innovative treatment.

You know, like yesterday I was listening to the radio, like normal treatment as you are aging.

I think there is...

Like five years ago, there was one treatment that would cost 80,000 euros a year.

And now I think, at least it's in France from the official number, we have something like 40 or 50 or even more.

So don't quote me exactly on that, but that really increased a lot.