Time to wake up and face technology

A recent article (1) that notes that advancing technology initiated productive scientific regimes, speculates that Artificial Intelligence could be the next engineering innovation that speeds up biological and chemical advancements. It makes sense but life sciences, an old and traditional industry, has been lagging in the application of technology. As high energy physics, economics and even business, embrace rapidly advancing AI, life sciences and healthcare have been reluctant.

Historical friction resulting from blind alleys followed by scientists based on prescriptive mathematics is one reason. Biology remains to be the last frontier where uncertainty and non-linear interactions have kept technologists from making measurable progress. Half a million years of trial and error could not be replicated easily in Silicon and this has been a late realization. Unchanging regulatory frameworks are the other reason why healthcare has not been able to take advantage of available technology. It is time that regulators realized that the failure and success of a pharmaceutical product have nothing to do with the p-value emanating from clinical trials data. Even manufacturing companies have moved away from this century old and incorrect notion.

Life sciences and healthcare have to (finally) embrace personalized medicine. Cross-sectional statistics of population data is misleading and damaging for the health of humans. It is not the health of the population that healthcare needs to worry about, but rather the health of the individual. Mass manufacturing of single-dose drugs is as archaic as TV dinners and static thresholds on blood pressure, sugar, cholesterol, and other such measurements are as obsolete as slide rules.

Healthcare, the most ancient of all industries, has been progressing slowly. If we are unable to break out of a constraining regulatory architecture and choking traditionalism, we will put the entire "population," at risk and the share of the GDP commanded by healthcare will continue to climb.

It is time for life sciences and healthcare to wake up and face technology.


(1) http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6405/864