Artificial Intelligence in Precision Oncology: MultiOmics to MultiDimensions

It was January 2020 when I started using audible service through my Amazon Prime membership. I never thought this one move during daily driving habit from work to home and home to work could change my personal and professional behavior and attitude towards life. By utilizing 1 credit, I bought a book, “Inner Engineering,” by my favorite spiritual mentor Sadhguru. Until now, I heard the narration by Sadhguru three times. The whole book looks familiar at a profound level, but I still want to go through more times. How did it change my behavior and life?

Sadhguru explains several of his life experiences in the book. He mentioned human life as a combination of physical, mind, and energy dimensions. I started seeing life as it is—acceptance of everyone and everything. No complaints. My profound thinking habits have found new dimensions to contemplate. Although I have transformed at the personal level, that is not a discussion point here. The one obvious thing I have noticed is my passion for a disease called cancer.

The whole world is trying to win over cancer, but I do not see cancer as an enemy. That’s because it’s a part of the same physical body. How should one hate, curse, or try to defeat oneself?

This brings us to an intense level of understanding about the cancer development process. Cancer initiates, grows, spreads, and dominates the whole physical body. At last, the physical body, along with the standard mechanisms, decides to turn off.

What role the mind, a psychological aspect of a human being, play during the cancer journey? I would say, immense role. It’s the mind who can help you cope with a disease like cancer similar to any other unfavorable condition. There is a plethora of modern and ancient science advocating the role of the mind in wellness and illness.

The third dimension, energy, is totally untouched by modern medicine. However, ancient Indian scriptures have pictured it beautifully in a “science of age,” called Ayurveda. Scriptures explained the Kosha system, Chakra system, and Nadi system to help “Prana,” life energy, flow.

The time has come to understand and exploit all three dimensions physical body, mind, and unseen energy body to defeat cancer in modern terminology. But, do we have precise technologies to monitor mind and energy dimensions? The answer is no. We have limited access to technologies that can only handle the physical body. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence has some hope in developing such algorithms to access the other two dimensions efficiently along with the several upgrades at the physical body level.

As a part of precision medicine and oncology, the current AI advances are limited to precisely integrating the DNA, RNA, protein, and metabolome data from cancer patients. The AI signatures can define and individualize the available treatment plan for clinical trials (e.g AI algorithms by Caris Life Sciences). However, this is just the tip of the ice burg.

To normalize the disease states in human beings, the AI field may develop the algorithms and monitoring systems to catch cancer at early stages to make the treatment aspect work efficiently. Patients with advanced cancer are being treated under clinical trials, and AI is transforming the way we recruit patients. In precision oncology, it is necessary to help all the communities by bridging the gaps in cancer treatment disparities. In the end, we all are part of the same energy, for those who believe in the big bang theory and gravity.

But the big question is, can Artificial Intelligence Integrate the physical, mind, and energy bodies in precision oncology? Can we all become part of this transformation by not seeing cancer as an enemy first?