AI Tools Help Alzheimer’s Researchers Dig Into Data

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[00:00:33] Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Thursday, March 27th. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. Want to cut down on the seemingly endless flow of spam calls and texts? We'll explain why tapping into your inner spy might be just the solution. Then, the technology that helps us get search results in seconds could also help researchers speed up drug development.

[00:01:02] First, the best way to free your phone of digital spam? Get a burner. Not a burner phone, but a throwaway number. The technique, which seems right out of the latest spy novel, allows you to keep your main number for important personal uses, and it gives you a different number to hand out to retailers, restaurants, and dating sites. WSJ personal tech columnist Nicole Nguyen explains that getting a second number is actually easier than it sounds.

[00:01:28] Nicole, for people who haven't actually done this before, how do you go about setting up a burner number, and why do you really need one? Everyone needs a burner number, and that's because our phone numbers have become a proxy for our identities on the internet. Every service asks you for your number. It's very rare to not shell out your number, and that's because it's a super valuable piece of information.

[00:01:54] The texting app, the messages app, is already installed on everyone's phones. SMS just works. You don't have to download anything. And once they have access to your phone number, these businesses can send you messages, and the open rate is very, very high compared to email. So it's a great way to get in touch with customers and potential customers. How would someone go about getting a burner number? The easiest way to get a burner number is through Google Voice.

[00:02:20] Google Voice offers a free virtual U.S. phone number. You can't pick your number, really, but you can choose an area code that's near you if your city is not available. The thinking here is whenever airport Wi-Fi or some, like, loyalty program at your favorite cafe asks for a phone number, you offer this virtual phone number instead. And once that phone number is inundated with too much spam, you can just change it.

[00:02:47] For people whose first foray this might be into the world of a second number, is it worth going through the extra steps just to save you from getting a few extra messages from stores that you're willing to give your number to? To me, yes. A lot of businesses that ask for your phone number can share it or sell it. And because that phone number is also used as account recovery for extremely sensitive accounts, like your Apple iCloud account that contains a decade worth of memories,

[00:03:15] or your Google account that is associated with your cell phone plan, it's a good idea to have less essential things, digital services, be tied to a different number that's not your primary account, just in case a business does decide to sell or share it. You do have to check another app to see if you received a message. But I think that's the point here is you don't want to be notified of these messages. You want to opt in to the messages.

[00:03:43] Although Google Voice does have a couple of ways to make sure you are notified, like you can get an email every time you get a text message or a voicemail, for example. There's a magical do not disturb button that sends all incoming calls to voicemail. So if that virtual phone number ends up on some list that marketers are using, you won't have to worry about incoming spam calls.

[00:04:09] So if you decide to go down this route of actually getting a second number, it gets inundated, it gets put on lots of different lists, and you're getting all kinds of spam that you don't want. How easy is it then to just throw that number away and get a new one and then associate it with your Google Voice account or whatever other app you're using? So Google Voice does allow you to change your number, but you can only do so once a year. Switching to a new number is not something that you should be doing every few months,

[00:04:37] but Google Voice does allow you to change it at least once a year. And if you do need to change it more often, there's another app called Burner App that allows you to switch numbers more frequently, though there are app limits on the number that you can change per billing cycle. But that app allows you to have multiple virtual numbers. So you can have a virtual number just for your dating app, a virtual number that's an emergency SOS line for your child care provider or something like that. Burner App, which does charge money, is a good solution for that.

[00:05:06] That was The Wall Street Journal's personal tech columnist, Nicole Nguyen. Coming up, Alzheimer's drug research is getting a boost from AI. We'll tell you how after the break. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Stressing over cybersecurity, whether you're a startup, growing fast or already established, Vanta can help you get ISO 27001 certified and more.

[00:05:34] Plus, it allows your company to centralize security workflows, complete questionnaires up to five times faster and proactively manage vendor risk to help your team stay compliant. Head to Vanta.com slash Spotify to learn more. Over the years, technology has made research easier for everyone.

[00:06:00] We no longer have to spend hours at the library, roaming the stacks and thumbing through endless pages in books. That's because now on-demand search engines can scour reams of information and turn out accurate results in seconds. That underlying technology is now being paired up with AI to help Alzheimer's researchers save time and hopefully find results faster. WSJ reporter Belin is here now.

[00:06:25] It seems like knowledge graphs are at the center of a strategy by these researchers at the Oxford Drug Discovery Institute to use AI to help them comb through reams of data faster than they otherwise would be able to. Just explain what knowledge graphs are and how much time this whole process can really save these researchers. A knowledge graph is basically like a map that can lead you through a bunch of connections between various data points.

[00:06:51] Like I think about a spreadsheet with numbers and rows and that's how you represent data. A data is represented more like a map. So it can lead you through what Victoria is searching is similar to what Victoria searched in the past. And you can sort of predict what Victoria might be searching for in the future. A knowledge graph is something that was popularized by Google about 10 years ago or so to really improve its search engine results. And so when you're searching for something on Google, you have really a knowledge graph to thank.

[00:07:20] But it's also really interesting and relevant for enterprises as well as life sciences organizations because you don't just want to know which particular medical journal this particular study was found in. You need to know how it links to a certain gene that you're particularly interested in studying. And that was what the Oxford Drug Discovery Institute was trying to do. So knowledge graphs themselves are not the new technology. Pairing it with artificial intelligence is the more innovative part of this whole equation.

[00:07:47] How exactly did it help the researchers speed up? What were they able to identify faster that they couldn't do as quickly before? And how much faster are we really talking? So they say that they were able to do this process of looking through a very, very vast amount of biomedical information about 10 times faster. And that can be pretty significant because that's time that was essentially sort of automated away

[00:08:13] that their biologists and their researchers and scientists can now spend working on other aspects of the drug discovery process. But essentially, before implementing the knowledge graph and AI solution, the researchers at the Oxford Drug Discovery Institute had discovered 54 or identified 54 genes from this genome-wide association study that were related to the immune system. And based on those 54 results, they wanted to really prioritize and figure out where they should spend the most of their time

[00:08:41] figuring out which genes were druggable. Because essentially not all of those genes are going to be potential targets for pharmaceutical validation and further research. And so when they're doing this without the help of knowledge graphs, they're doing this completely manually. They're digging through PubMed, which is the National Library of Medicine's vast database of biomedical information and journals. And they're doing this all without the help of a solution that can comb through them really quickly

[00:09:08] and tell them about the various properties of these genes and the information that they're interested in. And so when you have the help of something like a knowledge graph and the help of AI that can do this kind of data crunching really quickly, that vastly speeds along the process. And you point out in your piece that Alzheimer's research is a particularly difficult area of study. Why is it so complicated to navigate and why is it also so time-consuming?

[00:09:33] The researchers told me that Alzheimer's in particular has a lot of confounding social and economic, social-environmental factors. And so that's why it requires a bit more of dedicated study because you have to sort out for those things. And there are so many genes that can point to Alzheimer's that in this particular part of the research process, you really want to spend the time digging through the vast amount of research to make sure that you are targeting the most druggable genes.

[00:10:03] Doing that work beforehand is extremely crucial. And I think as you hinted at, this kind of technology isn't just useful in biotech research. It can be applicable in other fields too, right? Yeah, definitely. Knowledge graphs have already been used by digital retailers to help provide recommendations for the recommendations that they provide to online shoppers. And so when you're looking through a website like, say, Pinterest, Pinterest is a knowledge graph based on the prior links that you've pinned,

[00:10:33] the profiles that you're interested in, the categories of maybe home decor or whatever the particular category might be. And that's how it provides a very personalized set of other pins that you might be interested in. That was WSJ reporter Belle Lin. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Just Jupiter with supervising producer Emily Martosi. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.