“How are you feeling?”

It wasn’t the sort of question I would expect to have been asked at age 20 — especially since I’d always had good health. But one day, my girlfriend noticed a lump on my neck.

The man asking me the question was tall and rugged, and concern marked his kind face. He looked the type to be wearing a football uniform and quarterbacking a touchdown drive. But he was wearing a lab coat and readying me to be zapped with beams of ionizing radiation.

“I feel fine,” I told him. And I honestly did, as I’d only been getting radiation therapy at the cancer center for a couple of weeks, and wasn’t really feeling any side effects. That would come later.

“Have you noticed any hair loss?”

“Not really,” I answered. He leaned closer and noticed something on my shoulders. Then he reached behind my head and brought his hand back… full of my own hair.

I was shocked. The radiation was already causing hair loss, something which I was told to expect, but it was still shocking. I had to change my hairstyle!

They took measures to limit the radiation damage to the parts of my body with cancer cells. When I went under the radiation machine (which looked like something out of a Star Trek set), it was on a custom-formed foam body support, made to place me under the invisible beams as precisely as possible.

They even tattooed me. The tiny tattoos I still carry were used to line me up precisely under the machine, so the radiation only went where it was needed.

Despite several measures to limit radiation damage to the parts of my body with cancer cells, I would still experience burned skin, nausea, and vomiting. My worried mother kept trying to overfeed me but I often just couldn’t keep it down.

Technology Saved My Life

Fortunately, I’m still cancer free more than 20 years later.

For some reason, Hodgkin’s lymphoma is particularly prevalent in young men.  The technology that cured me hadn’t been around for very long at that time. Had I been born a decade or two earlier, I might not have survived.

In the 1970s, it wasn’t even a 50/50 chance. By the 1990s when I was treated, the situation was much improved.

Today, thanks to improving medical technology, Hodgkin’s is becoming a more survivable form of cancer. If it is dealt with early, when just at Stage 1, close to 90% of patients survive 5 years, and overall, the five-year survival rate has risen to almost 75%.

That man and his team were some of the most wonderful, professional people I’d ever met. They saved my life! I haven’t seen them since, but sometimes I wonder how they’re doing all these years later.

Most 20 year olds think they’re ten feet tall and bulletproof, but facing your mortality at that age changes your perspective on things.

The experience also started my lifelong interest in medical technology, an interest I enjoy sharing with my readers by identifying exciting investable opportunities in the biotechnology space.

Today, a new revolution in medical technology is in the making…

The Great Generative AI Boom Of 2023

After OpenAI released a new version of its ChatGPT chatbot late last year, generative artificial intelligence software captured massive attention.

The app itself is the fastest growing in internet history, building a 100 million strong user base in its first two and a half months.

Currently, the chatbot app draws 25 million daily visits. And ChatGPT isn’t alone...

Google’s Bard GPT, launched in March, draws 140 million visitors per month and is expected to surpass 1 billion visitors by the end of the year.

But the enthusiasm goes beyond users accessing the benefits of the new technology on these new apps. Companies large and small see the potential of GPT AI and have gone into a frenzy investing in it.

The hardware demand to support the intense computational workloads of large language models (of which ChatGPT is a notable example) has driven massive sales to AI-centric semiconductor companies like NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA), which has more than tripled this year and broken through a trillion-dollar valuation.

“BioGPT” Generating New Cures

ChatGPT is great stuff and a very useful tool. But the greatest good a new technology can give us is helping us to live longer healthier lives.

Fortunately, the technology at the heart of ChatGPT isn’t just good for providing natural language answers via a chatbot. And generative AI can be trained on more than just text – which will revolutionize how we heal ourselves.

The gleanings and insights that generative AI technology can give us are revolutionizing medicine and creating new cures, even including cancer.

Our genetic profile makes us as unique as a snowflake, and how drugs interact with our bodies is unique. This is doubly true when it comes to cancer since the mutant cells that are the disease are also not just unique to a patient, but to themselves.

Generative AI will be used to examine your genome and help devise a personalized treatment plan based on a predicted interaction with therapeutic drugs. Even with existing drugs, this improves the chances of survival.

Machine vision AIs, trained with millions of medical scans, are already improving on humans when it comes to identifying the presence of cancer. In some cases, they have become so good that they can spot what specialists miss.

Computer technology has been used to help discover new drugs for years, a field that I’ve followed closely. But older technology, often referred to as computational biology or bioinformatics, has usually been limited to searching through catalogs of existing compounds and trying to match them with disease targets as well as for modeling the biomechanics of human cells in order to better tailor new compounds to interact with them.

Generative AI technology, on the other hand, is as the name suggests, capable of generating something entirely new. It can be trained on data, and then produce, that which doesn’t exist in any catalog or database anywhere, much like how ChatGPT can give you an original answer to a question about a business idea.

Instead of being trained on human text and having letters or words supplying the tokens to create an intelligible string of text as a response to a query, a biology-focused generative bot can be trained on a biochemical database, learn the relationships between the building blocks of proteins and other compounds, and create entirely novel potential drugs no one has ever designed before.

Just as ChatGPT can give you dozens of fresh ideas faster than any human can, an AI can do the same for new drugs.

A biotech company called XXXXX, for example, has been using artificial intelligence tools to greatly accelerate the creation of new leads for treating disease. One AI tries to find potential cures from a huge library of millions of compounds, and another examines the potential of them working in a disease condition, like predicting how they will interact with a site on a cell membrane.

But the company is upping its game with GPT technology. For example, XXXXX has built a chatbot into its discovery platform that helps researchers interact with it using natural language.

But even more important, the company is using Nvidia hardware to power its generative AI platform to discover entirely new drugs.

The AI “studies” a potential disease modifying drug target, then generates brand new drug candidates. The AI even predicts how well the candidates will bind to the target and how clinical trials will turn out. Developers take these leads and run from there.

The process works at the incredible speeds of modern computer hardware – far faster than the old days when researchers had to painstakingly screen many drug candidates using test tubes.

The old way of doing things would cost $400 million and take up to six years. One AI company claims it can do this for 10% of the cost and 33% of the time.

The potential for generative AI to revolutionize the discovery of new drugs hasn’t been lost on Nvidia. In July, the semiconductor juggernaut invested $50 million into an AI biotech company called XXXXX.

Naturally, the company plans to use Nvidia technology in order to train its AI models, which it can then provide to drug development companies for use as a service.

But Recursion isn’t the only kid on the block...

Dozens of biotechnology startups have launched over the past couple of years based on the potential of this AI technology when applied to healthcare. And companies are starting to go public, which creates exciting investment opportunities.

In September AI drug developer XXXXXXXXXXXX raised hundreds of millions in a round that included mega-investors. I expect many of these companies will begin to go public in the months ahead, which will provide investors with exciting opportunities.

Generative AI is a game changer for biotech stocks and things are just getting started. This new technology won’t just create fortunes for investors, it could even save your life.

More soon.