News In Context

DeepMind And BioNTech Are Building AI Lab Assistants To Advance Science

In the latest example of how AI-driven technologies are transforming the methods and nature of scientific research Google DeepMind and BioNTech separately announced this week that they are launching AI lab assistants.

Demis Hassabis, chief of Google’s AI arm, said the DeepMind AI lab assistants will be able to suggest and design experiments based on a given hypothesis and give scientists a probabilistic view on a proposed experiment’s potential success or failure, helping researchers to collaborate across disciplines and make unexpected connections more easily.

Meanwhile, German drugmaker BioNTech and its London-based AI subsidiary InstaDeep said on October 1 that they had designed a specialized AI assistant known as Laila with a “detailed knowledge of biology” built on top of Meta’s open-source Llama 3.1 model. In a live demonstration, research scientist demonstrated how the AI agent could automate routine scientific tasks in experimental biology, such as analysis and segmentation of DNA sequences, and the visualization of experimental results. “We do not believe that the future is full AI automation any time soon, Karim Beguir, chief executive of InstaDeep told the Financial Times. “We see AI agents like Laila as a productivity accelerator that’s going to allow the scientists, the technicians, to spend their limited time on what really matters.”

InstaDeep also presented AI models that could help BioNTech identify or discover new targets to tackle cancers, at the first presentation of their technology since the Covid-19 vaccine maker acquired InstaDeep in 2023, according to The Financial Time’s story.

Companies such as Google and Microsoft are adapting large language models — software that can generate text, code, images and even DNA or molecular sequences, based on large training data sets — to help facilitate scientific breakthroughs. In 2022, DeepMind designed an AI system known as AlphaFold that could predict the shape of almost every known protein, solving a 50-year-old scientific challenge and potentially reducing the time required to make biological discoveries significantly. Hassabis has since spun off this work into an AI drugs offshoot known as Isomorphic Labs, which has agreed partnerships worth up to $3 billion with Eli Lilly and Novartis.

“Major innovation breakthroughs in the life sciences will be coming to an AI model near you,”  Thomas Conway, PhD, a university professor and AI futurist, wrote on his LinkedIn profile, in reaction to the news this week that Google DeeMind and BioNTech are launching AI lab assistant. “Those who have the AI tech will radically outpace those who don’t. This is a major challenge for …small and medium size biotech firms. “

Emerging technologies like AI could worsen existing power imbalances by enabling major corporations, particularly in sectors like pharmaceuticals, to innovate more quickly, secure more patents and exert greater control over scientific knowledge. This raises critical questions around access, equity and fairness. How can we design future protection models that balance innovation, access, and fairness in a rapidly evolving technological landscape? That is the main question that will be posed during a panel discussion which will be moderated by The Innovator’s Editor-in-Chief at the invite-only annual summit of The Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA), on Oct. 9-11. For more on the tension between the human right to science and intellectual property rights in the age of AI click here.

IN OTHER NEWS THIS WEEK

HEALTH

Owkin and AstraZeneca To Develop AI Tool For Breast Cancer Testing

Owkin, a French AI-biotech that uses cutting-edge causal AI to unlock precision drug discovery, development and diagnostics, announced a new partnership with AstraZeneca, a global biopharmaceutical company, to develop an AI-powered tool to pre-screen for gBRCA mutations (gBRCAm) in breast cancer directly from digitized pathology slides. As part of Owkin’s ongoing collaboration with Gustave Roussy and The Centre Léon Bérard through PortrAIt, a French consortium to accelerate precision medicine through AI-enabled digital pathology, this tool aims to significantly accelerate and expand patient access to gBRCA testing.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

SWIFT To Trial Live Tokenized Transactions In 2025 next year

Global bank messaging network SWIFT will trial live transactions of tokenized assets and digital currencies next year, it said on October 3, the latest step in the currently slow-moving integration of such assets into the wider financial system. Banks and asset managers have been exploring “tokenizing” traditional assets like bonds for several years. They hope that by using digital units – usually blockchain-based tokens that represent a share of the underlying asset – trading can be quicker, cheaper and more efficient, including by cutting out middlemen involved in many transactions.

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About the author

Jennifer L. Schenker

Jennifer L. Schenker, an award-winning journalist, has been covering the global tech industry from Europe since 1985, working full-time, at various points in her career for the Wall Street Journal Europe, Time Magazine, International Herald Tribune, Red Herring and BusinessWeek. She is currently the editor-in-chief of The Innovator, an English-language global publication about the digital transformation of business. Jennifer was voted one of the 50 most inspiring women in technology in Europe in 2015 and 2016 and was named by Forbes Magazine in 2018 as one of the 30 women leaders disrupting tech in France. She has been a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneers judge for 20 years. She lives in Paris and has dual U.S. and French citizenship.