Beating Cancer

Hey Change Makers,

We're switching up the format a bit this week.

We've had some great feedback from readers that they want to see a mixture of stories from Change Makers.

In order to do this we are reformating the newsletter.

We will now provide you twice-weekly bulletin-style briefings and then significantly deeper pieces every 10 days or so, focusing on specific change makers.


Today's topics?

1. Cancer vaccines
2. Google's biggest fear
3. Drones swarms

Most people understand how a normal vaccine works. You get a shot and it protects you from getting an illness, like the flu for a certain period of time.

Some clever scientists asked, “what if we could use vaccines to help treat cancer?”

Turns out you can. But it doesn’t work how you think.

The vaccine is being given to patients who are being treated for Melanoma. Melanomas are an aggressive type of skin cancer.

Melanoma cells have a specific type of protein on the outside of them which you can imagine like a cancer fingerprint. Once a doctor has surgically removed the cancer, some awesomely clever scientists can use some awesomely clever tech to make a vaccine.

This vaccine primes the patient's immune system to find any leftover cancer cells with this protein and destroy them.

This decreases the chance that the patient’s cancer comes back (which is sadly how most people die of cancer).

Where to from here?

You kind of have to throw out all the usual caveats of “this technology is early and still being tested” blah blah blah

Researching this, we were left asking the question “How has this not cured cancer yet?”. We sent 2 men to the moon in 1969 but haven’t been able to cure a disease that monstrously affects billions.

This is the wrong way to think about the future of this disease. There won’t be a golden bullet cure because every cancer is different. The way to win is by beating cancer in 1000 different battles.

Cures for all types of cancers might come from many small iterative steps in the right direction.

So rather than asking why we haven't reached the finish line, I should be standing to attention and saluting the change makers fighting the war against cancer. This vaccine might mean we win one of the key battles.

Some more reading:

• Nature’s article on cancer vaccines

• Guardian article on Cancer Vaccines

We asked Perplexity, “What’s Perplexity?” Here is the answer:

“Perplexity AI is a powerful search engine that uses artificial intelligence to help you find information more efficiently. Unlike traditional search engines that just return a list of links, Perplexity actually reads and understands the content, then provides a concise summary with the most relevant information”

Boring answer, but definitely a change maker. Why? Because Perplexity asked one fundamental question.

If we were to design a search engine from the ground up, what would it look like? One thing you would probably do is provide the user with answers not just a bunch of links on how to find the how to find answers.

This sounds obvious but the last 20 years of search engines haven’t been that. Google provides you with 10 blue links, 3 of which pay to be there. This is like saying “Here’s our best guess at where you might find the answer” and then it's the user’s job to read all the websites to find it. 

Perplexity believes there is a world where AI can give you the answer you are looking for, immediately. 

What does this mean for the future?

There’s a fair chance Google is crapping its pants - as AI threatens to erode their hugely profitable search business. But they can’t sit on their hands while their competitors go all in on a technology that might change the game. 

This weird set of incentives has led to some atypical behaviour; like their release of a woke Multi-modal model that gave us black Nazis and Asian members of the royal family. 

Meanwhile, Perplexity is giving Google the change maker 101 →  working diligently and without bureaucracy towards a new era of knowledge and information retrieval.

Could this be Google’s Kodak moment?

Some more reading:

• Why Google’s DEI problem won’t be an easy fix

Last week, we droned (lol) on about a new era of defence companies being led by a firm called Anduril (read our newsletter on Anduril here). 

Not to be self-congratulatory but we called it. This week saw two huge announcements from defence companies.

But first some context.

One of the largest costs of militaries is its people. Soldiers are some of the bravest members of society willing to lay down their lives to protect the freedoms of the societies they represent. 

This bravery comes at a huge emotional cost in wartime, with families losing loved ones to the horrors of war. What happens if autonomous systems can fight wars? 

This week Anduril and Qinetiq (a British defence company) announced programs with the American and British Departments of Defense to build autonomous jet-powered fighter drones. 

Anduril has been commissioned to build 1000 of these things. 

What does this mean for the future?

The nature of war is changing. This is scary because it means if you don’t lead from the front and are caught on the back foot, we will be at huge risk from our strategic adversaries. 

In a more mundane sense, this represents a step forward for start-ups and working with governments. The US government has shown a desire to prioritize innovation and change over the existing swamp of defence companies. 

It is the best time to be a change-maker in defence.

Some more reading:

• Anduril wins big US Autonomous aircraft contract