🔬 Training Transformers to solve 95% failure rate of Cancer Trials — Ron Alfa & Daniel Bear, Noetik

Tolstoy famously wrote, 'All healthy cells are alike; each cancer cell is unhappy in its own way.' Or something like that. Cancer might be the most misunderstood disease out there. It’s not one disease, it’s a family of diseases. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of unique diseases each with its own underlying biology. With this lens, saying you’ll “cure cancer” is like saying you’ll solve legos. We keep hearing AI will cure cancer, but sadly it may not be so easy. One company — Noetik — thinks they can use AI to break through a core bottleneck in the treatment development process. GSK recently signed a $50M deal for their technology that also includes an (undisclosed) long-term licensing deals for Noetik’s models. Most big AI plays in BioTech have focused on discovery, and usually result in an in-house development effort (meaning tools companies usually become drug companies). This deal stands out in that it is a software licensing deal, and represents a commitment to a *platform* rather than a *drug*. With attention on other software tools for drug development (see the [Boltz episode](https://www.latent.space/p/boltz) and Isomorphic for example), it is starting to look like the appetite of Pharma for biotech tools has finally started to grow. Why the sudden interest?