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Moonshots · 2 min · Oct 15, 2026

In-silico cures for 5,000 diseases may arrive in 2 to 3 years

Alexander Wissner-GrossHost

Founder, Reified

Has backed and advised 40+ tech companies, directly and through 021T Capital and Reified; writes The Innermost Loop.

  • Peter DiamandisHost · Founder, XPRIZE

    Co-founded Singularity University and founded Zero-G; co-wrote the books Abundance and Bold.

  • Salim IsmailHost · Founder, Open ExO

    Co-wrote Exponential Organizations; was Singularity University's founding executive director; sold Ångströ to Google.

  • Dave BlundinHost · Founder & GP, Link Ventures

    Has co-founded 23 companies; founding CEO of Vestmark and chairman of insurance marketplace EverQuote.

About this segment

Alex predicts virtual cells will yield proposed drugs for the top 5,000 diseases within two to three years. The harder question is policy: whether the FDA accepts in-silico trials.

From “OpenAI Bulk-Solves 722 Math Problems, Anthropic’s Cruelty Policy, & Elon’s Quadrillion-Dollar SpaceX”, Oct 15, 2026. Watch the full episode

“I think we're going to see that in the next two to three years maximum.”
Alexander Wissner-Grossat 57:49 · Moonshots57:49

Takeaways

  1. Prediction: virtual cells yield drug candidates for 5,000 diseases in 2-3 years
  2. The bottleneck shifts from science to FDA and regulatory policy
  3. China approving first could pressure the US into faster trial regimes
Watch 1:50 from 57:03

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 41:45Math is bulk-solved first because it is easiest to verify2:56

  2. 57:03In-silico cures for 5,000 diseases may arrive in 2 to 3 years1:50

  3. 1:08:02Curing disease is a path-planning search problem, not a mystery2:35Up next

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 57:08

    before the FDA accepts drug testing in silico on virtual cells? It's a policy question. I mean, I do think for the record, and we wrote about this a bit in Solve Everything, I do think just like we were talking about from one day to the next, substantially every problem of a certain level of difficulty in math was basically just solved. I do think there is going to come a day sometime the next few years if you press me I'll give you a year range and we did put a year range okay I think if I were pressed as to when from day n we go to day n plus one and there are in silico proposed say small molecule drug interventions that cure the top 5,000 diseases thanks to a virtual cell I think we're going to see that in the next two to three years maximum. Now, there's the second step, which is, okay, so now

  2. 58:04

    suppose I have in silico proposed drugs and interventions to cure the top 5,000 diseases. What do you do about it? Do you do clinical trials? Do you get FDA approved in silico clinical trials, which hasn't quite happened yet, but you can see the present FDA inching in that direction with, in some cases, one clinical trial regimes, in other cases, Bayesian versus frequentist statistics. I think that becomes a policy question. And it depends on who's in the White House at the time. It depends on who the FDA commissioner and who's involved in general with governance is. So that's harder to predict. I'd like to think that if, say, Anthropic, which just in the past month came out of stealth regarding their own program to, it appears,