Personalised drug screening

Reading a MIT Technology Review article from 15 Feb 2023: AI is dreaming up drugs that no one has ever seen. Now we’ve got to see if they work.

The part that caught my interest:

The researchers took a small sample of tissue from Paul. They divided the sample, which included both normal cells and cancer cells, into more than a hundred pieces and exposed them to various cocktails of drugs. Then, using robotic automation and computer vision (machine-learning models trained to identify small changes in cells), they watched to see what would happen. 

I didn’t realize this was a thing now: trying out approved drugs on cancer cells to see which ones are most likely to work for a particular patient. (It worked for Paul, and he’s in remission).

Exscientia, the company profiled in that piece, is doing lots of interesting things.