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How AI Agents Are Transforming Pharma · CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered.

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: Anthropic also bought another company, Coefficient Bio.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: They're opening uh a wet lab uh in the Bay Area, and they've got partnerships with six of the major pharma players, including Bristol Myers Squibb.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: And venture capitalists are starting to invest with the idea of, hey, I can sell my company not to MerkerPfizer, but maybe to Anthropic.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of what's going on.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Does it mean anything?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think it means it means that the well, there's two key implications.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: One, that these models might be the AI platforms might be directly relevant to transforming the way we assess, invent, and then deliver medicine in a much faster, more personalized, more scalable ways.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the fact that one dude could, you know, it used to be, it's like a magic trick that some guy, a m a man could it's like sort of low, though the joke's about the one-man band.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: But what the Frontier Labs create are the opportunities to create quasi or totally independent agents, sort of thinking units that then can work together, like let's call it an agentic layer, to actually execute tasks, pursue business, do research, and potentially drive insights and potentially drive manufacturing of new drugs.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty wild to think that um the this you know the the the two billion dollars and thousands of people in multiple companies that it normally would take to create a drug might be solved with a bunch of uh digital bots, if you will, that are agentic.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: That don't need any of that.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And and I guess, Dave, what's this what do you think?
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because historically our the biopharmaceutical industry, people know about Moore's Law, which is that we as we uh that computing power and cost goes up by factors, you know, every few years.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: It gets twice as fast and is half and costs half as much.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you map computing power and cost, you see this curve of incredible yields and low and and lowering costs.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: If you look at biopharmaceuticals, it's increasing costs and increasing time.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's the it's uh literally a reversed Moore's law.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: And this could completely reverse that, I think.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that the implication of what you're suggesting?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell I guess a reverse Moore's law would be like uh e-room.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: Is that is that Moore spelled backwards?
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: So uh maybe maybe that's what it will be.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: John, one of the things is very hard.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm glad you brought up Moore's law because it's very difficult for the mind to comprehend exponential changes.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we can go and say Are you talking about me?
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: No, I think you could do it, but I think for I say it's difficult.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: But it's hard.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard, John.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: So it's hard to look and you and you say, like, what's the implication?
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: You can look and say, wow, these bots are going to do everything.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: But the but one way to look at it is let's let's understand what's happened already and what did those steps tell us, and maybe in these particular acquisitions.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: So and from the just from what's happening with these companies and what it means for the business strategy of Anthropic, which still has to go out and raise money from people.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: So they previously said they were just a software platform, not a drug developer.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's actually owning assets, so that has some potential conflicts with its partners like BMS, Crystal Myers Squib, and then there's concerns, you know, things they might be concerned about their IP leaking out, overlap of therapeutics.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then I'm always interested in these things, you know, like this the idea of the one-person biotech.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what does that mean?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, first of all, there have been there's a lot of virtual biotechs that are out there.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we work with some of them.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: After we work with one that has no employees, if you can believe that.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: But um, it's pretty common to go and coordinate external resources.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: The CROs, contract research organizations are outsourced.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, it's often a company with one or two people might be able to orchestrate them.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the software is accelerating that, but you know, that is just this is just preclinical.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: This is a mouse, it's not a person.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's in the physical biology, the wet lab throughput, you know, those are bound by just whatever execution speed you could have.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: It reminds me a little bit of something from 20 years ago, or so when there was high throughput screening, when you're going to be able to go through all these different molecules very quickly and try to find the right targets.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: So it's sped up one part of the process, but we we haven't, it hasn't made a dramatic, such a dramatic impact on the rest of them.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what I'm seeing at the moment is the next step.