AI-Generated Medicine Makes Move to Human Trials 💊

Good morning, AI explorers — and happy Friday!

Welcome to another edition of AI Authority, delivering all of the top groundbreaking AI news shaping our world into a bite-sized newsletter every weekday morning.

As always, we’ve got one daily AI headline, two exciting tools, and three pieces of content we love from the community for you today.

In this edition:

✍️ News: AI-Generated Medicine Moves to Human Trials
🛠️ Tools: HeyPi, RunwayML (fresh off massive fundraises)
🎨 Creator Corner: Nature Knolling, Stunning Text-to-Video Realism, Bing’s Ability to Interpret Drawings

Here’s everything you need to know:

One top headline in the AI space to know:

💊 AI Medicine Makes Move to Human Trials

We’ve shared several impactful stories on the intersection of AI and medicine over the last few months — from technology helping a paralyzed man to walk again to an AI full-body scanner that helps detect cancer at a higher rate.

And in yet another landmark event for the future of medicine on Thursday, a fully AI-generated drug has been approved to move into human clinical trials for the first time.

Insilico Medicine, a biotech startup backed with over $400 million in funding, announced this week that their drug (titled INS018_055) is the first of its kind to reach Phase II trials that include human patients.

INS018_055 is designed to tackle idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis — a lung-scarring condition affecting approximately 100,000 Americans.

“When this company was launched, we were focused on algorithms — developing the technology that could discover and design new molecules,” said Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine.

“I never imagined in those early days that I would be taking my own AI drugs into clinical trials with patients. But we realized that in order to validate our AI platform, we needed to not only design a new drug for a new target, but bring it into clinical trials to prove that our technology worked.”

The journey doesn't stop with this one drug, however; Insilico has two more AI-backed drugs waiting in the wings, reportedly targeting Covid-19 and cancer(!).

The process of getting a drug approved is currently a lengthy one — so we’re still likely years off from seeing this drug go to market.

But even getting to this stage is an achievement — and is likely just the beginning of what could hopefully be a new wave of medical advances.

Fingers crossed that humanity could have cures for some of of the deadliest medical conditions in the near future — with a helpful assist from AI.

Two AI-powered platforms to add to your toolbox:

Thursday was a big day for AI startup investments, with both RunwayML and Inflection AI announcing major raises.

Highlighting these two products in light of the major news:

• HeyPi —  Inflection AI’s personal chatbot with a focus on active listening and conversation (link)

• RunwayML — Text-to-video generation (link)

Runway introduced a new Gen-2 preview function, which is super helpful in being able to see what your output looks like before deciding to generate:

Three of our favorite tweets, threads, AI generations and more:

The concept of ‘knolling’ has been one of my favorite discoveries since diving into Midjourney. So aesthetically pleasing!

Via @imaginarypix:

Speaking of Runway… This generation from @SteveMills feels strikingly real compared to some of the wild stuff we’ve shared in the past:

A wild example of AI’s multimodal abilities from @emollick. Mind-blowing interpretation skills from Bing:

See you next week! With the holiday weekend and Fourth of July, the next edition will be in your inboxes Wednesday morning.

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