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October 11, 2026 \u2014 7:00pm<\/p>\n
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Remove items from your saved list<\/a> to add more.<\/p>\n No gift articles left<\/p>\n You’ve used all of your gift articles. 3 more will become available on the 1st of every month.<\/p>\n Close<\/p>\n AAA<\/p>\n Personalised medication, drugs to combat the rarest of cancers, knowledge of our individual cell interactions and even pre-empting disease in the body \u2013 one Sydney lab is working on all of these possibilities and more, thanks to the advent of artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve become very interested in how we can leverage AI to save lives and improve the patient outcomes,\u201d said Professor Fatemeh Vafaee, deputy director of the University of NSW\u2019s AI institute and a professor in the school of biotechnology and biomolecular sciences. <\/p>\n An AI drug-development platform is among the breakthroughs made possible since the technology exploded in 2022, Vafaee said. The model is upending traditional drug development, which succeeds around 10 per cent of the time, takes 15 years to develop a drug from beginning to end and costs about $2 billion.<\/p>\n The complexity of diseases such as cancer and diabetes means that often one medication is insufficient and combination therapy \u2013 using a mix of different drugs together \u2013 is better able to tackle the disease. But the number of potential combinations had previously slowed researchers down.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an intractable problem \u2013 if you have 1000 drugs and you want to look into the combination of two or three drugs across different dosages, there are millions of experiments that you need to run,\u201d said Vafaee. \u201cThis is where AI can come on board to prioritise that and look into combinations that could be efficacious before we go into the lab experiments.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can predict possible combinations of drugs ahead of lab experiments.\u201d<\/p>\n Vafaee\u2019s lab has so far picked 24 synergistic combinations, which have been validated in pre-clinical studies at Melbourne\u2019s Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and are now going to higher levels of testing.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, Vafaee worked with a commercial partner to develop a blood test ruling out recurrent breast cancer, something that affects 15 per cent of breast cancer patients and that had plagued doctors because of its unpredictable post-cancer time frame.<\/p>\n These breakthroughs are among the work highlighted by the University of NSW in its forthcoming Social Impact of Science report, which will be released on Monday. The report proposes a new framework for measuring research that zeroes in on commercialisation, scholarly outputs, policy and influence, lives changed, and sustainability and development.<\/p>\n Born in Iran, Vafaee received her PhD in AI in 2011 from Chicago\u2019s University of Illinois, which she has since applied to biomedicine. AI developments and access to large-scale data since 2022 \u2013 the same year that ChatGPT launched \u2013 have meant that scientists can do things \u201cseveral thousand times faster\u201d than previously.<\/p>\n Related Article \u201cWe don\u2019t want just to predict for breast cancer and brain cancer,\u201d she said. \u201cWe want to be able to adopt that into [rare] cancer or even other diseases.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd this is where we have been developing AI tools for transfer learning, what we can transfer the knowledge from one disease to another … that would help us to go through less common diseases and look at how we adopt AI for the patient\u2019s benefits. Every single patient matters, and we can use this technology for patients that we have less population level data available for.\u201d<\/p>\n Personalised medicine for all was around the corner, she said, if AI was granted access to large-scale data.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are all different and we need to move on from one solution fit everyone,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat I would love to see in future is that we go from being reactive to what we observe, to being proactive to what we predict.\u201d <\/p>\n Start the day with a summary of the day\u2019s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n Save<\/p>\n You have reached your maximum number of saved items.<\/p>\n![\"Fatemeh](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/052b3205a008374778b307a2b8c69035475a20ba.jpeg\")
Fatemeh Vafaee says that the provision of patient data is key to AI unlocking medical breakthroughs.Steven Siewert<\/p>\n![\"John](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/cc3628baef1caca3fb8fbb3d12bb7a19772fbd67.jpeg\")
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