AI 如何让老药新用?(1)In the elegant quiet of the café at the Church of Sweden , a narrow Gothic-style building in Midtown Manhattan , Daniel Cohen is taking a break from explaining genetics .
He moves toward the creaky piano positioned near the front door , sits down , and plays a flowing , flawless rendition of " Over the Rainbow ." If human biology is the scientific equivalent of a complicated score , Cohen has learned how to navigate it like a virtuoso .
Cohen was the driving force behind Généthon , the French laboratory that in December 1993 produced the first-ever " map " of the human genome . He essentially introduced Big Data and automation to the study of genomics ,
as he and his team demonstrated for the first time that it was possible to use super-fast computing to speed up the processing of DNA samples . Scientists worldwide have built on Cohen ' s insights , and Cohen himself , an MD with a Ph . D . in immunology ,
has gone on to success as a researcher and pharma executive . But a quarter-century later , genomics has yielded few of the kinds of paradigm-changing medical breakthroughs that many of its early innovators hoped for .
Today , as chief executive and founder of Paris-based drug startup Pharnext , Cohen is striving to understand why that rainbow hasn ' t led to a pot of gold . " Any protein in the body has many different functions , not only one ," he says ,
returning from the piano to talk with me , " just as you are a person who has many functions in the population , not just one ." The phenomenon Cohen is describing is " pleiotropy ," the capacity of a single gene to have multiple , seemingly unrelated effects .
It is one of the complexities of disease that has repeatedly frustrated medical researchers in their quest for therapies for the most stubborn illnesses . Cohen not only appreciates pleiotropy ' s significance : He believes that Pharnext and other drugmakers may soon exploit it -
with a powerful boost from artificial intelligence . By embracing the body ' s complexity , and by using A . I . to more methodically analyze and map the way the chain reactions of disease sweep through the body ,
he hopes to develop combinations of drugs tuned to attack a plethora of medical conditions . Cohen and his team are also applying A . I . to search for therapies that leverage " repurposing "-
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