Editor’s Note: Andrew Prince has been working with Ian King’s team as a key Research Analyst since 2021. He contributes his analyst skills to all of Ian’s financial services, including Strategic Fortunes, Next Wave Crypto Fortunes, Sigma 180, True Momentum and Extreme Fortunes.
Today, he’s going to share about an exciting new wave of AI advancement taking root in the biotech industry — “Tech Bio” — and how you can invest in this emerging sector.
How One AI Model Beat 57,000 (Human) Competitors
The way our technology has advanced is impressive…
But none of it has come close to the sophistication of the natural technology found in biology.
In 1919, a Hungarian agricultural engineer named Karl Ereky predicted that we would one day study and understand biology, enough so that we could use it to convert raw materials into useful products.
He was the one who coined the term for it. This leveraging of biology that would drive technology forward — through biotechnology (or biotech).
Today, we live in that world Ereky imagined.
The biotech industry has brought us innovations in medicine, agriculture, fuel, food production and so much more.
Like Ian said last week, companies like Genentech have been able to solve real-world needs through biotech breakthroughs, like creating synthetic insulin. (Today, around 200 million people in the world depend on insulin to treat diabetes.)
Biotech is a global market that’s growing exponentially each year: from just $1.55 trillion in 2023 to $1.77 trillion this year…
By 2030, biotech is projected to reach $3.87 trillion.
And now, one of the biggest technological advancements in the world is transforming the biotech industry…
Trial & Error: AI Gives Biotech a Major Upgrade
Yes, artificial intelligence is being applied in the biotech industry!
And it started years ago, especially in the area of biomedicine.
For example, one crucial area in biotech is the study of protein structures in DNA.
Scientists have a pretty good understanding of how living beings create the primary structure of proteins.
But what they don’t fully understand is how a chain of proteins can fold into a three-dimensional shape:
This molecular folding takes a protein from being a simple chain of molecules, to a functional structure within living organisms.
Simply put, this is a key part of what makes DNA work.
If we can predict these folded structures, we can start to design proteins in labs that can be used to develop drugs for all sorts of medical treatments.
But this is a very difficult process. You essentially have to play around with a model of a protein chain until you find ways in which it can be folded.
So imagine how long that trial and error process takes for a scientist in a lab.
Researchers at the University of Washington came up with a solution — by creating an online puzzle game called Foldit.
This allowed multiple players to try out different combinations and approaches that would ultimately yield more protein structure predictions.
The university released the game in 2008, and by 2010, 57,000 players had come up with 146 potential protein structures.
So let’s assume that those 57,000 players continue to come up with 146 potential designs every two years…
Since the game’s launch, that would result in 1,168 potential designs.
Now let’s take a look at a Big Tech company that applied a different solution.
In 2018, Google tasked an AI model called AlphaFold with this problem.
By 2022, AlphaFold came up with more than 200 million potential designs for protein structures!
That’s over 195,000 times more designs than 57,000 humans working together could have come up with in the same time frame.
AlphaFold was made available to the public in 2022 — along with its database of 200 million designs. Researchers can, and have used this data to design new drugs, vaccines and enzymes.
That’s just one example of a new wave of advancement taking root in the biotech industry — all with the help of AI and machine learning.
This phenomenon is called “Tech Bio.”
It’s a small, but fast-growing segment. And it has the potential to accelerate biotech to levels Karl Ereky could never have predicted in his wildest dreams.
Work that used to take labs years and hundreds of scientists to do is now being automated and done in weeks … even days.
Now, they can rapidly design, build and test, creating products in a fraction of the time.
And just like the name sounds, Tech Bio firms that are innovating in this space look and behave more like tech companies than pharmaceutical companies.
Ian believes we’re still at the beginning of this Tech Bio revolution, which presents an incredible opportunity for investors to get in early.
His research has led him to three Tech Bio companies that could deliver up to 10X gains over the next few years…
And even windfalls up to 7,500% or more within a decade.
If you’re ready to learn more about these trades, watch his new presentation below:
If you have any questions, be sure to reach out to us at [email protected].
Happy Monday,
Andrew Prince
Research Analyst