We know that the entire world is going through a phenomenon called AI which is now seen everywhere we go and it has been seen in medical research as well. Now, there is an AI-based platform for medical research named Causaly which was founded by Yiannis Kiachopoulos who is one of its co-founders. Their company, which is just more than six years old right now, already has clients such as Gilead, Novo Nordisk, Regeneron, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
“For each drug to make it to the market there are nine that failed,” said Kiachopoulos, working out to a 90% failure rate. “Each of those drugs typically costs between $1 billion and $2 billion to develop, according to research from the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. This gives us a real chance to accelerate and provide patient and societal benefits.” When asked by TechCrunch if “compute power was an issue for his startup as well, given that this is indeed one of the big themes among AI startups right now, biomedical or otherwise, and his answer was a surprising “no.” He added “Only a very small fraction will go into compute resources,” he said. This was partly due to how Causaly was built and partly because of its role in the ecosystem. “Six years ago, when we were starting the company, there were no large language models, so what we have built is not compute-power hungry. We were building natural language querying before Chat GPT, and so we didn’t need large language models now.”
He also added that “With LLM it can get easier to query AIs. That is true and we are working on that. But you don’t need to train an LLM from scratch so we can take and fine tune what there is, and fine tuning is a lot less of a drain on compute resources.” He also mentioned that “Our solution helps biomedical teams, but we are not developing our own therapeutics,” and that “We are a SaaS-based platform, training our scientists to get the most out of our AI. We have very strong partnerships and not competing, nor do we have plans to.”
