AI for Medicine - The Batch

Diagram shows Robin system generating hypotheses, analyzing data, and producing therapeutic suggestions.

Machine Learning Research

Put the Lab in the Loop: Robin automates drug discovery, matching chemical processes of known drugs to research on diseases

An AI agent proposed new medical uses for established drugs nearly autonomously — uses that were supported by experiments on isolated human cells — with human input only to name diseases to be treated and run the AI-proposed lab experiments.

Flowchart of an ESMC-6B model with sequence encoding layers, language model, and diffusion transformer output.

Machine Learning Research

Biological Molecules as Language: ESMFold2 approaches AlphaFold 3 performance but with an open, Transformer-based architecture

Google’s AlphaFold models pioneered the task of finding the shapes of biologically active molecules, opening new pathways for drug development.

Map with UK sites; flowchart depicts mammogram study steps, highlighting AI’s role alongside doctors.

Machine Learning Research

AI Mammogram Diagnosis Under Real-World Conditions: Two studies test Google's breast cancer detection models in clinics

Introduced in 2020, Google’s AI system for detecting breast cancer in mammograms still hasn't been used to diagnose current patients.

Diagram showing AI-driven drug discovery process, from lung fibrosis data to molecule generation.

Machine Learning Research

Big Pharma Bets Big on AI: Pharmaceutical kingpin Eli Lilly gave Insilico $2.75 billion for AI-driven drug development

Generative AI has proven that it can produce text, images, audio, video, and code. The world’s most valuable pharmaceutical company is betting billions that it can produce drugs as well.

A table compares AI models, highlighting Muse Spark's performance across multimodal and health benchmarks.

Machine Learning Research

Life After Llama: With Muse Spark, Meta pivots away from its open-weights Llama strategy

Meta pivoted from its open-weights strategy to deliver a closed alternative.

Woman outdoors smiling, wearing sunglasses and hoop earrings, surrounded by blurred green foliage.

Tech & Society

Pitfalls in Assistive Models for the Blind: Blind people can use AI models as virtual mirrors, but don’t always like what they see

People whose vision is impaired increasingly use AI to assess their own appearance, raising questions about the psychological impact of AI models that are trained on conventional standards of beauty.

Diagram shows SleepFM's data processing flow from sleep signals to disease prediction using neural networks.

Machine Learning Research

Sleep Signals Predict Illness: SleepFM detects signs of neurological disorders years before symptoms manifest

Difficulty sleeping often precedes heart disease, psychiatric disorders, and many other illnesses. Researchers used data gathered during sleep studies to detect such conditions.

Flowchart showing Dr. CaBot's AI reasoning process for diagnosing and suggesting medical tests.

Machine Learning Research

More Robust Medical Diagnoses: Inside Dr Cabot, an agent trained to diagnose complex conditions

AI models that diagnose illnesses typically generate diagnoses based on descriptions of symptoms. In practice, though, doctors must be able to explain their reasoning and plan next steps. Researchers built a system that accomplishes these tasks.

Business

Meta Moves to Buy Agent Tech: Meta strikes a deal to acquire Manus, a Singapore-based agentic AI startup with Chinese origins

A high-profile acquisition could enable Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to offer built-in agents that do users’ bidding.

A blue caduceus with AI logos, representing OpenAI and Anthropic's healthcare innovations.

Business

AI Giants Vie for Healthcare Dollars: OpenAI and Anthropic release new chatbots targeting medical and wellness markets

OpenAI and Anthropic staked claims in the lucrative healthcare market, each company playing to its strengths by targeting different audiences.

Diagram showing SCP hub linking clients with databases, tools, AI agents, and lab devices for experiments.

Machine Learning Research

Lingua Franca for Science Labs: SAIL’s Science Context Protocol helps AI Agents communicate about local and virtual experiments

An open protocol aims to enable AI agents to conduct scientific research autonomously across disciplinary and institutional boundaries.

Pengtao Xie is pictured standing near a chalkboard filled with mathematical notes, addressing a classroom of attentive students.

Machine Learning Research

Multimodal Models for Biomedicine by Pengtao Xie: Pengtao Xie of UC-San Diego on why medical models need to visualize tiny chemicals and large organs

Over the past few years, we have seen rapid progress in models that jointly reason over text, images, sequences, graphs, and time series. Yet in biomedical settings, these capabilities often remain fragmented, brittle, or difficult to interpret.