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I write a lot about science fiction. I've written about using science fiction as a product roadmap. I've unpacked the dueling fates of science fiction as a force for optimism or pessimism. I've talked about Palmer Luckey's framework for looking back at past imagined futures for clues to what we should be building today. But my favorite piece I've written on the topic is called Historical Futurism.
In that piece, I framed the act of "opportunity canvassing" as this pursuit of a world worth creating:
"By identifying the futuristic universes we most want to idolize, or even the aspects of more dystopian worlds that we can learn from, we start to form the basis of a future we want to create."
Much of the work of science fiction is about imagining this dream world, or to conjure the nightmare of the dystopian hellscape we want to avoid. But, unfortunately, sometimes the dystopian hellscape we want to avoid doesn't need to be dreamed. It is the reality we currently live in.
We live in a world where we have learned to program everything, from the physical world with over 3.5 million industrial robots operating worldwide to space with over 180 orbital launches per year to the sum total of human knowledge with over 1.6 trillion words used to train frontier AI models like GPT-4. But despite all of that progress, we are still largely incapable of programming the human body. As a result, we suffer the wrath of dozens of heart-wrenching diseases:
Cancer kills nearly 10 million people globally each year, making it the second leading cause of death worldwide. In the US, nearly 40% of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer during their lifetime. Chemotherapy and radiation can cause debilitating fatigue, nausea, nerve damage, and permanent organ damage, and even if you manage to survive, most people who endure the experience will report lasting trauma from treatment.
Alzheimer’s affects 1 in 9 Americans over 65 and is a major cause of death for this age group, with no cure and no way to slow progression. The disease destroys memory, personality, and basic bodily function over years—patients may forget their own family, become non-verbal, and require round-the-clock care. Death can take 4 to 8 years after diagnosis, but some suffer for up to 20 years.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, killing about 18 million people each year. In the US, 1 in every 5 deaths is from heart disease, often caused by conditions that develop silently over years, like atherosclerosis or heart failure. Survivors of heart attacks may face lifelong disability, breathlessness, fatigue, and repeat hospitalizations.
Chronic kidney disease affects more than 1 in 7 US adults, and most don’t know they have it until it's advanced. Once kidneys fail, patients must undergo dialysis up to 4 times a week, spending hours hooked to machines that clean their blood—without it, they would die in days. The 5-year survival rate for dialysis patients is just 35%, worse than many cancers.
More than 1 in 10 Americans (over 38 million people) have diabetes, and it's the 8th leading cause of death in the US, often due to heart attacks, kidney failure, or sepsis. Type 2 diabetes can silently damage blood vessels, eyes, kidneys, and nerves for years, while Type 1 requires constant glucose monitoring and insulin management to avoid deadly spikes or drops. Every 3 minutes, someone in the US has a limb amputated due to diabetes.
That's the dystopian hellscape that billions of people live with every day. What better nightmare is there to tackle if we want to dream of the better world that we want to exist? That's where Valinor comes in.
The Undying Lands
"For the deathless dwelt [in Valinor], and there naught faded nor withered...nor any corruption or sickness in anything that lived, for the very stones and waters were hallowed." (The Silmarillion)
My friend, Josh Pacini, took inspiration from JRR Tolkien's dream of a land away from Middle Earth, where the weary could find rest, and healing, and peace – Valinor. When I think about the myriad of diseases that humanity is riddled by, I think about computer code. There are problems in our system. Bugs in the code.
In 2023, when Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, was asked where he thought the next amazing revolution was going to come from, he said “digital biology” because “for the very first time in human history, biology has the opportunity to be engineering, not science.”
In my conversation with Josh, he didn't lay out the path to a miracle drug for every disease. Instead, he focused on what the most significant bottleneck is for us to have dramatically more breakthroughs in the fight to eradicate these diseases. That bottleneck? The failure rate of clinical trials. As Valinor's mission statement explains:
“Billions of dollars and countless hours are poured into clinical R&D every year, yet 90% of that spend and time is wasted on programs that ultimately fail.”
The problem isn't a shortage of ideas to explore drug solutions to the world's worst diseases. It's the ability to rapidly test those potential solutions at scale without costing billions of dollars.
That led to Valinor's proposed solution: automating clinical trials.
But that isn't robots running the trials instead of researchers. Instead, Valinor is focused on automating clinical trials in silico; effectively a digital computer simulation based on "massive, patient-derived multi-omics datasets" that can determine with high accuracy the likely outcomes of particular drugs without having to get to a single human trial.
Josh explained Valinor's approach thought process this way:
"To date, science has been incredibly hypothesis driven. You have to know what you’re looking for. But AI enables drug development to be much more exploratory vs. requiring a specific thesis ahead of time. Biology is not an indecipherable black box; it’s living code that we can model and understand."
The Journey To Valinor
This week, Valinor announced their launch with partnerships alongside Dr. Fabian Theis's lab at Helmholtz Munich, Latch Bio, and the Montgomery Lab at Stanford Medicine. I sat down with Josh to unpack their methodology at Valinor to most effectively assess the clinical-viability of predictive drug models. The hope is that Valinor's platform will unlock a capability for drug companies to rapidly increase the rate of feedback loops they can cycle through for any given drug.
The utopian future that Josh and the team at Valinor are envisioning is one where we don't have to suffer and die at the hands of bugs in the biological code of humanity.
As I dream the dream for Valinor, we can certainly create a situation where we much more rapidly eradicate the diseases that plague billions of people across the world. As Valinor’s capabilities expand, there is a big broad universe of biological suffering that humans endure, not the least of which is aging. Can Valinor cure death? To ponder that question, we can turn again to Tokien’s writing for some perspective.
In a 1963 letter Tolkien described Frodo’s final journey – sailing across the sea to The Undying Lands – and in that description he ponders death:
“Frodo was sent or allowed to pass over Sea to heal him — if that could be done, before he died. He would have eventually to ‘pass away’: no mortal could, or can, abide for ever on earth, or within Time. So he went both to a purgatory and to a reward, for a while: a period of reflection and peace and a gaining of a truer understanding of his position in littleness and in greatness, spent still in Time amid the natural beauty of ‘Arda Unmarred’, the Earth unspoiled by evil.”
To me, Valinor doesn’t represent a selfish escape from death. It represents a respite from the frailties of mortality. As Tolkien says, by being relieved of some of the evils of the Earth, we can “gain a truer understanding” of our position in the universe.
In another letter, Tolkien made it clear, saying “certainly Death is not an Enemy! The Elves call 'death' the Gift of God (to Men).” We may not alleviate death’s natural place alongside mortality, but we can ease the journey towards that destination. Death is not the end. It is simply another path. One that we all must take.
If Valinor is successful it will arm the would-be champions of suffering’s alleviation. The more programmatically we can wield the elements around us, the more progress we can make. Valinor is a platform focused on leveraging artificial intelligence to dramatically improve the quality of life of every human. Both today, and forever.
I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. And be sure to check out Valinor’s launch announcement and get in touch with Josh Pacini, Valinor’s CEO.
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