Anthropic is making biotech boasts, but scientists are wary of hype around curing cancer

Anthropic has been pushing is biotechnology projects in a bid to drive up its stock price, but scientists warn people need to be realistic.The AI giant has opened a biology lab in the Bay Area, bought two biotech startups — one for about $400 million in stock — and partnered with drugmakers including Bristol Myers, Squibb and Novo.CEO Dario Amodei predicted powerful AI could cram 50 to 100 years of biological progress into the next five to 10.This summer, he wrote promising AI will cure cancer had become a “cliché” and that “the thing that will work is actually curing cancer.”While AI from Anthropic and other companies has greatly benefitted the medical industry, people working in the medical field all their careers caution against hype.“A good chunk of the timeframe has passed since [Amodei’s prediction], but we are far away from that goal,” Andreas Bender, a professor of machine learning in medicine at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, told the Post.“The human proof point is what counts, such as a clinical trial,” added Bender, who has co-founded several AI drug-discovery startups and has no ties to Anthropic.No drug developed by AI has yet won full approval from the Food and Drug Administration and the leap from the lab to the human body is where most medicines die.“You can do an experiment, things work very well, you have all kinds of supporting data from cells or mice or from biopsies, and then it gets to the clinic and fails completely,” a Silicon Valley cancer scientist with over 10 years of experience in the field, told the Post.“You can pour millions of dollars and thousands of man hours on some method that looks wonderful in the lab, but when it gets to clinical trials, nothing happens.

And it’s not because someone was stupid,” the scientist, who asked not to be named, said.“Every human is drastically different from every other in multiple hundreds, thousands of parameters,” he said.“That’s why so many drugs might ...