The Innovator's Radar newsletter enables you to stay on top of the latest business innovations. Enjoy this week's edition.
Jennifer L. Schenker
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief |
|
- N E W S I N C O N T E X T - |
|
Artificial intelligence has yet to fulfill its promise of helping treat or even eradicate some of the most serious diseases. Two initiatives announced this week are hoping to change that.
Less than five months after its launch, French startup Bioptimusannounced the release of H-optimus-, which is being billed as the world’s largest open-source AI foundation model for pathology. With 1.1 billion parameters, H-optimus-0 is trained on a proprietary dataset of several hundreds of millions of images extracted from over 500,000 histopathology slides across 4,000 clinical practices. This sets a new benchmark for state-of-the-art performance in several critical medical diagnostic tasks, from identifying cancerous cells to detecting genetic abnormalities in the tumor.
Meanwhile, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Flagship Pioneering, the venture capital fund that launched Moderna,an American pharmaceutical and biotechnology company that focuses on RNA therapeutics, primarily mRNA vaccines , said it is planning to create multiple new biotech companies harnessing GenAI to power drug discovery after securing $3.6 billion in funding from its financial backers.
Traditional drug discovery is a notoriously time consuming and expensive process, with pre-clinical stages typically taking three to six years and costing hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. With the promise of lower costs and shorter development timelines, AI-enabled drug discovery holds massive potential to increase the accessibility of drugs and to treat presently incurable conditions.
AI’s application to pathology, the cornerstone of disease diagnosis which requires meticulous examination of tissue samples to identify abnormalities, also appears promising. Traditionally, this process relies heavily on pathologists' expertise and experience. However, the increasing complexity and volume of cases necessitate advanced tools that can assist pathologists in making faster, more accurate diagnoses. Read on to learn more about this story and other important technology news impacting business. |
|
| Stay on top of the latest business innovations and support quality journalism. Subscribe to get unlimited access to all of The Innovator's independently reported articles. |
|
| String Bio, a Bengalaru, India-based scale-up, converts methane, a greenhouse gas, into valuable raw materials to make high-performance products, including protein for humans, helping to solve two major global issues. Methane, which accounts for at least a quarter of total harmful emissions, helps to form ground-level ozone, a dangerous air pollutant that is responsible for approximately one million deaths and the loss of up to 110 million tons of crops each year, according to a U.N. study. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, accelerated reductions in methane emissions must come by 2030 to have any chance of meeting the 1.5°C global temperature target—or even the 2°C target. Meanwhile, the world is expected to face an animal-based protein crisis by 2050 due to unsustainable demand from growing populations worldwide. Increased demand for animal-based protein is expected to have a negative environmental impact, generating greenhouse gas emissions, requiring more water and more land. Experts say addressing this perfect storm will necessitate more sustainable production of existing sources of protein as well as alternative sources for direct human consumption. String Bio, which in June was named a 2024 World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer, is doing just that by using its patented fermentation platform to convert methane that would otherwise pollute the environment to deliver proteins and protein-based ingredients as a clean and traceable replacement for plant and animal sources. The ultimate aim is to redefine manufacturing, by making sustainability inherent in the way human and animal feed are manufactured, says Dr. Ezhil Subbian, who co-founded the company with her husband, Vinod Kumar, in 2013. String’s commercial products also include ‘bio-stimulants’ for crops such as rice that can increase yield and offset greenhouse gas emissions at the point of use, enhancing sustainability in two ways. |
|
- I N T E R V I E W O F T H E W E E K - |
|
Who: David L. Shrier, is a venture builder, globally recognized expert on artificial intelligence, author, and a Professor of Practice (Artificial Intelligence and Innovation) at Imperial College London where he director the Centre for Digital Transformation and is co-lead on the Trusted AI Alliance. He specializes in helping established organizations build innovative capacity, having developed $10 billion of corporate venturing opportunities and innovative mindset with enterprises including GE, Evercore, Dun & Bradstreet, Thomson Reuters, UBS, Ernst & Young, Wolters Kluwer, The Walt Disney Company, AOL Verizon, Pearson and Starwood.
Topic: How to architect exponential growth.
Quote: "If you use AI properly, you can improve productivity by at least 30%, which all drops to the bottom line. And that's only the beginning. But you need to change mindsets...It is a campaign of sustained change, and it entails a great deal of effort to overcome cognitive biases. If it were easy, everyone would be seeing exponential growth, rather than only some.
|
|
- S T A R T U P O F T H E W E E K - |
|
| French-American scale-up Dioxycle, a 2024 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, is developing technology to produce sustainable ethylene from carbon emissions, at equal or lower costs to fossil equivalents. The technology can be retrofitted onto existing manufacturing plants, capturing the carbon emitted during the industrial process and transforming it into green ethylene that can be used to make new products, making factories both more sustainable and circular. With a market size of some $180 billion, ethylene is the world’s most consumed organic chemical: It is used in the production of textiles; everyday plastics used in consumer goods, car interiors and packaging materials; furniture, cosmetics; and construction materials like pipes, window frames and flooring, but its production has a hefty carbon footprint. By removing fossil fuels from the production of ethylene, Dioxycle has the potential to slash CO2 emissions by 800 million tons every year. “ “Our enabling technology can help existing industry to reinvent their processes,” says co-founder Dr. Sarah Lamaison. The company has initiated a pilot program to give manufacturers early access to the technology. It has already signed letters of intent and memorandums of understanding with companies in a range of sectors, including carbon-intensive manufacturing sectors, consumer brands, and the chemical industry, she says. |
|
- N U M B E R O F T H E W E E K |
|
| Percentage of manufacturers in a survey of over 2,500 leaders worldwide who said they plan to increase spending on AI in 20024. This is lower than the global consensus of 63% and U.S. consensus of 69%. Manufacturers are deploying planned Generative AI initiatives at a slower-than-anticipated pace due to concerns around accuracy, Lucidworks, which conducted the study, said July 10. Generative AI processes inputs or prompts to produce new content based on past data used to train it. However, it sometimes generates inaccurate or nonsensical outputs known as hallucinations. While 36% of all respondents expressed concerns about response accuracy due to hallucinations, a higher number of manufacturing respondents, 44%, share this concern. For some users the cost of failure is minimal but the cost of a bad prediction in an industrial process can be extremely costly.
|
|
|
|
