Bill Gates funds $1mn AI Alzheimer’s prize
New competition is latest effort to deploy artificial intelligence to find cures for serious illnesses
Researchers hope AI can uncover new insights that might have been missed via autonomous analysis of the vast troves of patient information gathered from decades of research © Peter Dazeley/Getty Images
Bill Gates is funding a $1mn competition to spur the use of artificial intelligence to find innovative treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, the latest effort to deploy the promising technology to find cures for humanity’s toughest illnesses.
The Alzheimer’s Insights AI prize will be awarded to the team that comes up with the most original way to program AI-powered agents that are “capable of independent planning, reasoning, and action to accelerate breakthrough discoveries from existing Alzheimer’s data”.
The winning tool will be released for free on the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative’s cloud “workbench” to be used by scientists globally, the organisation said on Tuesday. The prize is being financed by Gates Ventures, the family office of the billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder.
Researchers hope AI can uncover new insights that might have been missed via autonomous analysis of the vast troves of disparate patient information gathered from decades of research into the most common type of dementia.
The Alzheimer’s Insights AI prize will be financed by Bill Gates’s family office © Bay Ismoyo/AFP via Getty Images
The Alzheimer’s Insights AI prize will be financed by Bill Gates’s family office © Bay Ismoyo/AFP via Getty Images It is estimated that 55mn people suffer from dementia, with the number forecast to triple by 2050 as the world’s population ages.
“We all recognise the burden of Alzheimer’s disease and that’s only going to get worse,” said Gregory Moore, a senior adviser at Gates Ventures. “We haven’t seen the novel treatments come to market with the sense of urgency that we’re demanding.”
“Unless you’ve been living under a rock, AI is a real thing and the scientific establishment needs to take advantage,” he said, by using specialised agents as “teammates” able to plan, reason and generate hypotheses.
The contest comes amid rising competition in Silicon Valley to develop AI models that can help diagnose medical problems, develop new drugs and cure degenerative diseases and cancer.
Medicine has emerged as one of the most promising use cases for the technology and companies have entered the field, seeking the prestige and good publicity conferred by breakthroughs, as well as a potentially lucrative new business line.
Google’s DeepMind has the most proven concept, with the lab’s founder Sir Demis Hassabis jointly winning a chemistry Nobel Prize last year for using an AI model called AlphaFold to predict the structure of proteins, unlocking the biological secrets that underpin life.
Isomorphic Labs, the drug discovery start-up spun out of DeepMind, raised $600mn in March and hopes to have AI-designed drugs in clinical trials by the end of the year.
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Hassabis’s DeepMind co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, joined rival Microsoft last year and started an AI health unit, poaching many of his old colleagues. In June, he unveiled “Diagnostic Orchestrator” software powered by a team of five AI agents, which Microsoft claims is four times better than human doctors at identifying the most complex diseases.
Retro Biosciences — which was seeded with $180mn by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman — is raising $1bn to fund new AI-linked Alzheimer’s and longevity treatments. These include novel cell therapies that can reverse the ageing process in brain microglia and bone marrow, resetting the biological age of blood.
The Alzheimer’s Insights AI prize will open on August 19 to contestants from AI engineers, computational biomedicine experts, clinical specialists, AI start-ups and big tech companies. Further rounds of the competition would be held in San Diego in December, with the finals in Copenhagen in March, the organisation said.
“The massive amounts of data being generated, no one human can really grasp and begin to look for patterns,” Moore said. “We’re hoping to create tools for harmonisation, to create a unified, large-scale dataset to uncover invisible insights that are currently siloed around the world.”