Mathijs C. Bunck, MD, PhD
5.1K posts
@1900b
Physician Scientist | Clinical Trialist | Professional Reader | Cardiometabolic Endocrinology | Existentialist | Astronaut Wannabe | 🇳🇱🇺🇸
Jensen Huang just called the exact top of the pharmaceutical industry. Not a pivot. Not a disruption. An extinction event. Huang: “Where do I think the next amazing revolution is going to come? And this is going to be flat out one of the biggest ones ever. There’s no question that digital biology is going to be it.” The medical establishment has spent centuries playing a chaotic game of trial and error. We’re about to mathematically engineer the human operating system. Huang: “For the very first time in human history, biology has the opportunity to be engineering, not science. When something becomes engineering, not science, it becomes less sporadic and exponentially improving.” Biology is no longer the dark art of random discovery. It’s a predictable, compounding execution loop. Translate the chaotic variables of chemistry into the laws of computer science and you stop waiting for accidental breakthroughs. You simply compute the cure. That line should terrify every pharmaceutical executive alive. Huang: “It can compound on the benefits of the previous years. And every researcher’s contributions compound on each other.” For decades, drug discovery has been an isolated, artisanal process. One lab. One team. One molecule. Years of blind iteration. The algorithm just shattered that entire bottleneck. Every failed protein fold, every successful synthetic molecule instantly trains the foundational model. Makes the next iteration mathematically smarter. Huang: “We’re going to have incredible tools that bring the world of biology, which is very chaotic and constantly changing and diverse and complex, into the world of computer science. And that is going to be profound.” Incumbent pharma looks at the human body and sees an unmanageable wall of variables. Engineers look at that exact same body and see raw data waiting to be compiled. No longer guessing how a molecule will react in the physical world. Running millions of zero-cost simulated iterations before a single test tube is ever touched. Rip the chaotic friction out of the physical lab and drop it directly into a massive GPU cluster? The timeline to map, edit, and optimize the biological machine doesn’t shrink. It collapses.
Sharing with permission: Patient's route to work includes subway rides, and for the past couple of weeks, the escalators were broken. Several flights of stairs climbed daily--previously incomprehensible--and now no 😅, ⬇️50 lbs on tirzepatide #nonscalevictory #obesitycare #obesity (Side note: I wish some of these NSVs were validated on a #research level because, to be frank, improvement in hand grip strength or sit-to-stand test just isn't as 🎉🎇 for the patient)
