Google DeepMind spin-off Isomorphic Labs is building an AI drug design engine that it believes can “solve” all diseases. We spoke to its Chief Technology Officer in Lausanne about Switzerland’s key role, AI hype, and what it will take to cure cancer. In 2013, Sergei Yakneen was on the fast track to a brilliant tech career, managing a team of software engineers at Amazon in Toronto, Canada, when his life took a dramatic turn. His mother died of pancreatic cancer aged just 54. Yakneen grew up in the 1980s surrounded by doctors and scientists in Krasnoyarsk, a major industrial city in central Siberia, which had a reputation as a land of exile for opponents of the Russian regime. Yet he never felt the calling to become a doctor like his mother, an oncologist at the city hospital. “I was more interested in computers,” said Yakneen, who would spend hours assembling computers and writing computer programmes as a kid. But watching the doctors in his family search for a treatment for his ...
Read Full ArticleThis article was originally published on swissinfo. Click the button above to read the complete article.
