There is understandable uncertainty around AI, especially in healthcare. But harnessed well, AI could transform the future of medicine.
AI is already improving healthcare, from supporting diagnostic screening, to accelerating drug discovery. Its true potential, however, is to help us understand how life works: what keeps us healthy, what causes disease to start and progress, why we respond differently to infection, and why two patients with the same diagnosis can experience different treatment outcomes.
The possibilities are enormous and the need is urgent. Our ageing population and rising incidence of chronic disease, including cancer, dementia and heart disease, are placing an ever-increasing burden on our society. Long-term conditions account for around 70% of health and social care spending in England because too much of modern medicine is spent managing disease once it’s established. AI can help shift the focus earlier, to the biology that sets disease in motion.
This next frontier is AI that learns from biology and nature, revealing and predicting patterns in living systems. And the UK, with its world-class universities and research institutions, national health datasets, medical research charities, burgeoning biotech sector and collaborative ethos, is uniquely positioned to lead this revolution.
AI can help us understand why risk and resilience differ between people
Many human diseases evolve over decades. AI can help us understand why risk and resilience differ between people, based on their genetics, sex, age, infections and exposures.
Cancer is a good example: by 60, the average person can harbour sover 100 billion cells with cancer-linked mutations, yet almost none become a tumour. Identifying what keeps most cells in check, while a few might escape, could unlock new avenues for prevention. At the Francis Crick Institute and University College London Hospitals, researchers have used machine learning to analyse blood plasma protein data from more than 48,000 UK Biobank participants, identifying a unique protein signature that can predict lung cancer risk more than five years before diagnosis. One day, that kind of test could help target preventive treatment before cancer takes hold.
In Parkinson’s disease, researchers at the Crick and UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, working with Faculty AI, have shown that machine learning can accurately predict subtypes of the disease using images of patient-derived stem cells. This could pave the way for personalised medicine and targeted drug discovery.
We need biology-first science, with AI in the loop
Life is hard to predict. We need biology-first science, with AI in the loop, helping scientists make unanticipated connections, design experiments and validate results across scales, from single cells to whole bodies. This means integrating AI into experimental science, where computational models are tested against biological data, AI learns from life complexity, and discovery moves faster.
Within a mile of our labs at the Crick are Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, and many small biotech firms. Discovery science, world-leading universities and hospitals, and AI companies are close enough for us to move ideas from lab to company to clinic.
Turning that proximity into progress requires sustained public and charitable investment in discovery science, researchers trained across biology, medicine and computing, and partnerships that link London’s concentration of science, clinical insight and AI talent with research excellence, data resources and innovative companies across the UK.
The goal is not merely to deploy AI but to reimagine how we study health and disease, enabling a shift from reactive disease management to proactive prevention and true precision medicine. That could mean routine blood tests that flag risk years before cancer appears, or a patient’s own cells being used to understand which treatments are most likely to help.
The future of medicine depends on whether we can teach machines to understand life and use that knowledge to nurture it.
James Briscoe is Deputy Research Director and Charles Swanton is Clinical Director at The Francis Crick Institute
