Is AI the key to reversing ageing?

Ian Bolland speaks to Dr Chee Yang Chen, CEO of biotech Carta Biosciences, to discuss how artificial intelligence (AI) can reverse ageing, issues surrounding drug discovery, and the pressure put on healthcare systems because of care for the elderly. 

Dr Chen starts by explaining how it is possible to reverse ageing, and what drove him and his co-founder to start Carta. 

“We’re primarily focussed on not just symptomatic treatments but cures for disease. 

“Reversing disease is something we’re very passionate about because, as a doctor, being able to tackle and treat the cause as opposed to the symptom is something that’s really important to us. 

“If you look at genomics as a disc, and that disc has all of that information, it’s basically the dictionary for life. Then this disc gets scratched. I recall having to wipe away all of the scratches on discs – and that’s what we’re doing because being able to map biology allows us to see where the scratches are, essentially.”

The company is currently working in three areas of disease – including neurological disease such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, cognition and neurology and ageing, and there is the scope for broadening Carta’s reach. 

“Genomics, really, is universal. These pathways and this methodology applies to every cell in our body – allows us to actually do everything. I think we are primarily focussed on neurology right now and hair loss because that’s what we’re good at. We have the expertise for that but we are looking towards extending into other fields as well.” 

Chen explained that AI’s role for Carta means they work with single cell gene expression data, but explains the difficulty in taking gene expression from single cells. 

“Take, for example, companies with knowledge graphs on their data. The data that comes in is intrinsically unreliable and with machine learning models and computational models, what you put in is what you get out of it. That’s why you have to work from first principles to gather data that’s actually useful, biologically, and reflects reality.” 

Reversing ageing isn’t the only ambition at Carta Biosciences, it seems – as Chen offered his thoughts on the strain that medical infrastructure along with a desire to make drug discovery more efficient. 

Currently, pharma companies face extraordinarily high costs when it comes to developing a successful drug. In fact, it’s estimated that less than 10% of clinical trials for drugs make it to market, costing pharma companies billions in lost revenue.

Indeed, Carta Biosciences believes that part of this failure rate comes from a mismatch in our understanding of science when compared to the complexity of human biology. 

Chen explains why he thinks the industry is currently at a crossroads when it comes to drug discovery. 

“If you go back through history, we developed drugs by chance; throwing everything at a wall and seeing what sticks. Subsequently we’ve moved on with reductionist, rational drug discovery so all of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. 

“We don’t need to test everything we just need to test what works and ideally models reflect reality sufficiently that with the moment we take them to clinical trials we’ve massively de-risked.”