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A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

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Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#41

Post by JumpCrisscross »

alganet wrote: post #4
vessenes wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you might be pleased to know that there are large safety teams working at all frontier model companies worried about the same thing! You could even apply if you have related skills.

Are these safety teams subject to the oversight of more estabilished international agreements and safeguards?

> the oversight of more estabilished international agreements and safeguards?

“Unlike the chemical or nuclear weapons regimes, the [Biological Weapons Convention] lacks both a system to verify states' compliance with the treaty and a separate international organization to support the convention's effective implementation” [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#42

Post by westurner »

Other potential cancer treatment methods that 2.5pro - a different model than is referenced in the article - has confirmed as potentially viable when prompted by an amateur cancer researcher:

- EPS3.9: Polysaccharide (deep sea bacterium sugar, fermentable, induces IFN-1) causes Pyroptosis causes IFN-1 causes Epitope Spreading (which is an amplifying effect) causes anti-cancer response.

- CPMV; Cow-Pea Mosaic Virus (is a plant virus that doesn't infect humans but causes an (IFN-1 (IFN-alpha and a lot of IFN-beta)) anti-cancer response in humans. Cow Pea consumption probably used to be even more prevalent in humans before modern agriculture; cow peas may have been treating cancer in humans for thousands of years at least.)

I emailed these potential new treatments to various researchers with a fair disclaimer; but IDK whether anything has been invested in developing a treatment derived from or informed by knowledge of the relevant pathways affected by EPS3.9 or CPMV.

There are RNA and mRNA cancer vaccines in development.

Without a capsid, RNA is destroyed before arrival. So RNA vaccines are usually administered intramuscularly.

AFAIU, as a general bioengineering platform, CPMV Cow-Pea Mosaic Virus could also be used like a capsid to package for example an RNA cancer vaccine.

AFAIU, CSC3.9 (which produces the "potent anti-cancer" EPS3.9 marine spongiibacter polysaccharide) requires deep sea pressure; but it's probably possible to bioengineer an alternative to CSC3.9 which produces EPS3.9 in conditions closer to ambient temp and pressure?

> Would there be advantages to (CPMV + EPS3.9) + (CPMVprime + mRNA)? (for cancer treatment)

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#43

Post by lnenad »

wiz21c wrote: post #32

From what I understand, the model was used to broaden a search that was already conducted by humans. It's not like the model has devised new knowledge. Kind of a low hanging fruit. But question is: how many of these can be reaped ? Hopefully a lot! ("low hanging fruit", well, not the right way to put it, Google's model are not exactly dumb technology)

Reading comments around AI is always fun

> It's not like the model has devised new knowledge. Kind of a low hanging fruit.

Just keep moving goalposts.

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#44

Post by wiz21c »

squidbeak wrote: post #38
wiz21c wrote: post #32

From what I understand, the model was used to broaden a search that was already conducted by humans. It's not like the model has devised new knowledge. Kind of a low hanging fruit. But question is: how many of these can be reaped ? Hopefully a lot! ("low hanging fruit", well, not the right way to put it, Google's model are not exactly dumb technology)

> What made this prediction so exciting was that it was a novel idea. Although CK2 has been implicated in many cellular functions, including as a modulator of the immune system, inhibiting CK2 via silmitasertib has not been reported in the literature to explicitly enhance MHC-I expression or antigen presentation. This highlights that the model was generating a new, testable hypothesis, and not just repeating known fa…

ah ok, my bad. My worst post of the week :-)

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#45

Post by epistasis »

lnenad wrote: post #43
wiz21c wrote: post #32

From what I understand, the model was used to broaden a search that was already conducted by humans. It's not like the model has devised new knowledge. Kind of a low hanging fruit. But question is: how many of these can be reaped ? Hopefully a lot! ("low hanging fruit", well, not the right way to put it, Google's model are not exactly dumb technology)

Reading comments around AI is always fun > It's not like the model has devised new knowledge. Kind of a low hanging fruit. Just keep moving goalposts.

Look through any of the single cell atlas papers that are published all the time and you'l see slightly different methods, called machine learning in the past, AI now, used to achieve exactly the same thing. Every form of AI has been continuously produced new results like this throughout the history of genomics.

The reason you are reading about this is because 1) Gemma has a massive massive PR budget, whereas scientists have zero PR budget, 2) it's coming from Google so it's not the traditional scientists and you know Google and when they publish something new, it's makes it to HN.

I don't see any reason to be excited by the result here. It is a workaday result, using a new tool. I'm usually excited by new tools, but given the source, it's going to take a lot of digging to get past the PR spin, so that extra needless work seems exhausting.

Facebooks's proteins language modelling, followed by Google's AlphaFold, did have really new and interesting methods! But single cell RNA models have been underwhelming because there's no easy "here is the ground truth" out there like there is for proteins. We won't know if this is a significant advancement until years of study show which of the many scRNA foundation models make better predictions. And there was a paper about a year ago that poured a ton of cold water on the whole field: replacing models with random weights barely changed the results on the very limited evaluation sets that we have.

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#46

Post by epistasis »

aktuel wrote: post #29
MASNeo wrote: post #25

Remarkably some claim AI has now discovered a new drug candidate on its own. Reading the prep-print ( https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.14.648850v2.... ), it appears the model was targeted to just a very specific task and without evaluating other models on the same task. I know nothing about gens, and I can see that is an important advance. However, seems a bit headline grabbing when claiming victory fo…

If someone discovers anything, it does not change anything if someone else could have discovered it theoretically as well?

If a simple majority classifier has the same performance as a fancy model with 58 layers of transformers, and you use your fancy model instead of the majority classifier, is it the model that's doing the discovery or is it the operator that choose to look in a particular place?

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#47

Post by emp17344 »

lnenad wrote: post #43
wiz21c wrote: post #32

From what I understand, the model was used to broaden a search that was already conducted by humans. It's not like the model has devised new knowledge. Kind of a low hanging fruit. But question is: how many of these can be reaped ? Hopefully a lot! ("low hanging fruit", well, not the right way to put it, Google's model are not exactly dumb technology)

Reading comments around AI is always fun > It's not like the model has devised new knowledge. Kind of a low hanging fruit. Just keep moving goalposts.

What goalposts do you think were moved? Please elaborate.

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#48

Post by baq »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #31
mauriciogg90 wrote: post #21

Meanwhile OpenAI going into the porn business

If you can have porn without the human trafficking and exploitation associated with the porn industry, that's a big win too

OTOH... time for a wall-e rewatch

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#49

Post by mips_avatar »

wiz21c wrote: post #32

From what I understand, the model was used to broaden a search that was already conducted by humans. It's not like the model has devised new knowledge. Kind of a low hanging fruit. But question is: how many of these can be reaped ? Hopefully a lot! ("low hanging fruit", well, not the right way to put it, Google's model are not exactly dumb technology)

This just in "excel helped discover a potential cancer cure using pitvottables"
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