New podcast on medical innovation - Hard Drugs

[hotblack]

The official blurb from the website:

Hard Drugs is a new podcast about medical innovation: how to speed it up, how to scale it up, and how to make sure lifesaving tools reach the people who need them the most.

Presented and written by Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen. Brought to you by Works in Progress and Open Philanthropy.

The second episode is out and called “Proteins: Weird blobs that do important things” and is very accessible. Well worth a listen for what could be an interesting series.

But perhaps skip the first, I haven’t listened to it as it’s a mammoth 5hr long! But it seems to build on the interesting story of Lenacapavir from this article.

 

[hotblack]

There’s been a couple more episodes of this which are well worth a listen

100 years of insulin in 15 minutes is really interesting and short
Hacking proteins with AI is longer but with other threads talking about AI seems particularly relevant. Along with an article from last year
How Neil King and David Baker are using AI to create more effective vaccines

 

[hotblack]

More episodes…

The art of protein design with AI What if you could design a protein never seen in nature
An interesting discussion and also some great kinks in the podcast info including this course on using AlphaFold from EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute

AlphaFold - A practical guide

AlphaFold - A practical guide

www.ebi.ac.uk

And this vey long but very relevant episode, thankfully it’s separated up into chapters

Will AI solve medicine? Artificial intelligence is transforming how we discover and develop new medicines. But how far can it really take us?

I guess they couldn’t help themselves with the length of this one. They like to talk. But it’s worth sticking with if this is a topic you’re interested in.

 

[hotblack]

I really would recommend people listen to this series. Even the long 4 hour episode, you can break it up into bits as I have been doing.

There’s a lot of discussion of medical history, how we find and develop treatments for disease, how we do this even when we don’t understand disease, wider drug development, barriers to treatments, etc. It really is a lot of what we discus on these forums and a lot of what people ask questions about.

If you’re someone who is put off by the mention of AI please don’t be. This isn’t some boosterish snake oil but an accessible medical science podcast. It’s backed by blogs, articles papers and books. As well as hosts who have knowledge of the topics and I think a balanced view of possibilities and challenges with not just AI but the wider landscape of research and drug development technology.