Amgen's David Reese debunks AI 'all disease' cure hype

The panel at AHCJ's fall summit brought together David Reese, retired executive vice president and former chief technology officer at Amgen, and Mary Rozenman, chief financial officer and chief business officer at Insitro, to separate AI's real contributions from inflated promises. Reese's pointed critique—that those promising an 'all disease' cure generally have never worked on disease biology—reflects a gap between software-driven messaging and the realities of drug development.

The body illustrates where AI is already helping: predicting protein shapes in minutes rather than months, and building virtual human cell models with population-scale genetics. These tools address the early, target-discovery phase, which the panelists say can stall global drug development for months or years. But Rozenman noted that AI models are only as good as their training data, and that high-quality, standardized biological data often doesn't exist—it must be generated under strict laboratory conditions to avoid learning experimental noise. Simply dumping unstandardized data into a model, she said, generates errors rather than cures.

Both panelists agreed there is no sign AI alone can cure diseases overnight or answer biology's most complex questions. Rozenman's call to 'stand humbly in front of nature' and bring respect for biotechnology's complexity suggests that near-term progress will come from pairing AI with rigorous experimental data generation, not from model scale alone.