Failing Heart Drugs: Why Recent Clinical Setbacks Challenge AI Medical Optimism
The next time someone claims that artificial intelligence, or any other emerging technology, will cure every disease, it is more prudent to point that way to the ongoing battle against heart attacks and strokes—conditions that currently claim the most lives across developed nations.
Again and again, pharmaceutical researchers have learned the same hard lesson: innovations intended to accelerate medical breakthroughs have repeatedly fallen short. Two studies presented Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association exemplify this pattern. A groundbreaking understanding of genetics was expected to improve success rates—and it did not.
One study showed that a Novartis drug, pelacarsen, failed to alter the incidence of heart attacks and strokes even while lowering a substance in the blood called lp(a), which genetics suggested should reduce cardiovascular risk. A separate large-scale trial from Novo Nordisk targeting an anti-inflammatory protein called IL-6 also demonstrated no meaningful benefit.
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