AI SPECIAL
IS AI UNETHICAL? Andrea Pierleoni and his team at Healx use AI to come up with potential new treatments for patients with rare diseases. Despite this being an obviously positive application of machine learning, he is acutely aware of the need for AI to develop in an ethical way. “We’re in a bit of a bubble in Cambridge, so people around here understand what we’re doing, and the area in which we work is something everyone can benefit from,” he says. “Other areas cause more concern; AI is basically a set of very powerful tools, and can be used for good or bad. The negative perceptions around it arise because there’s always a lot more noise around bad things. But AI also has the potential to make major improvements to our lives. As with everything that’s powerful, it needs to be used correctly, which is why ethics are really important. Ethics start with researchers, they have to consider the implications of what they’re working on, and whether they will necessarily be positive. “A good example is a model developed by Open AI, which had the potential to generate realistic fake news
AI is basically a set of very powerful tools, and can be used for good or bad"
which it will use to develop its drug pipeline and to launch a global Rare Treatment Accelerator programme, which will help it connect with more rare disease communities. “We work with drugs that are already approved, and I lead a team of people whose job it is to make the sense of all the information that we can digest around these drugs,” Andrea says. “We use natural language processing to understand texts, looking at publications and other relevant documents, then extract the information and put it together. This is then used to make predictions about which drug may work for a type of condition. “We’re giving patients with rare diseases access to medication where they might otherwise have nothing.” healx.io
LEFT Andrea Pierleoni,headof AIatHealx
reports if it wasn’t used in the right way. They decided to only release part of the model because they knew that part could have very good effects.” Andrea is head of AI at Healx, which was co-founded in 2014 by CEO Dr Tim Guilliams and Dr David Brown, the co-inventor of Viagra. The company aims to advance 100 rare disease treatments towards the clinic by 2025 using Healnet, its AI platform, which delivers data-driven treatment predictions that can shorten the discovery-to-clinic timeline to as little as 24 months. The company recently raised $56m in Series B financing
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ISSUE 04
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