Inside Berg: the pharma startup fighting cancer with AI (Wired UK)

This article was first published in the April 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. In November 2013, more than 100 patients with cancer - including pancreatic, breast, liver and brain tumours - embarked on clinical trials involving BPM 31510, a drug discovered by an algorithm. The story of BPM 31510 begins with the extraction of biological data from healthy and cancerous tissue samples from over 1,000 patients. This data was then processed by artificial intelligence algorithms, which analysed it and suggested possible drug treatments. "We've essentially reversed the scientific method," says Niven R Narain, the 38-year-old president and co-founder of Berg, the Boston pharma startup which makes BPM 31510. "Instead of a preconceived hypothesis that leads us to do experiments and generate a particular type of data, we allowed the biological data from the patients to lead us to the hypotheses." Making an effective cancer-fighting drug is a notoriously difficult process: according to Narain, development and production can cost pharmaceutical companies up to 2.6 billion ( 1.8bn) and take 12 to 14 years to complete. "Only one per cent of the cancer drugs that make it to clinical trials prove to be effective. It's expensive and the development process is inexcusably long," Narain says.