The lab that runs itself
Everyone is excited about AI. Zhihu Qu is doing something rarer: he’s bolting it onto a fully-automatic robotic lab at Insilico Medicine in Shanghai — “the AI robotic lab that everybody is talking about.” It is one of the most striking things Marek and Aleksander saw on the whole quest.
The idea joins two powerful things. First the AI: give it a target and it predicts, generates candidate molecules, and virtually screens compounds against the target. Then the robots: the AI hands its shortlist to the automatic lab, which runs the real wet-lab experiments — “everything goes by the book” — and sends the results back to refine the next round.
The payoff is speed. A drug that would normally take about three years to push to its pre-clinical candidate stage, Zhihu says, they finished in eighteen months. When discovery is this fast, the treatments that could extend healthy human life arrive sooner — which is exactly why this sits in Biohacking Upgrades.
You have an idea; the data flows into the robotic lab; the machines start working. It is a glimpse of how the medicine of the next decades will actually be made.
