Capital market development is booming

AI medical company Tempus shares soar nearly 99%

Since the beginning of the new year, the stock price of Tempus AI, one of the most popular companies in AI medical care, has shown no signs of slowing down. It has soared nearly 99% since January 1st, shocking the global capital market and demonstrating the hot development trend of the AI ​​medical industry.

It is reported that Pelosi, the "Stock God" of the White House, also bought call options on the AI ​​medical company Tempus AI!

Tempus was founded in August 2015 by Eric Lefkofsky after his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. He founded the company to bring the power of technology and artificial intelligence to cancer treatment. The company focuses on using AI to promote the development of precision medicine. By building a huge multi-modal database and integrating genomic data, electronic health records, pathological images and other information, it provides doctors with personalized treatment plan support.

Cathie Wood, a well - known investor and the "female Warren Buffett" in the US, has recently been firmly bullish on AI + healthcare. She believes that healthcare is the most undervalued area of AI. In the long run, healthcare will become the most far - reaching application field of AI.

ARK Invest, founded by Wood, is a well-known institution focused on investing in disruptive technologies, with an asset management scale of US$30.2 billion. Its annual "Big Ideas" report has become an important document for global investors to understand cutting-edge technologies and market trends.

In this year's report, ARK Invest analyzed 10 major fields including AI Agent, stable currency, robots, driverless taxis, reusable rockets, and energy. Among them, multi-omics occupied 18 pages of content and became the subdivision with the most space, which shows its importance.

The report points out that using artificial intelligence to "manipulate" data will subvert diagnosis, drug discovery and treatment, and by 2030, the performance of the entire industry will improve by several orders of magnitude.

Specifically, AI will revolutionize multi-omics tools, drug development, and molecular diagnosis, and significantly improve the economic return of drugs, such as:

AI will reduce the cost of reading and writing biological information such as DNA by 100 times and 1,000 times respectively;

AI will reduce drug development costs by 4 times and increase return on R&D investment by 5 times;

AI will increase the efficiency of cancer screening by 20 times and expand the market size by 10 times;

The commercial value of AI drugs will be 20 times higher than standard drugs and 2.4 times higher than best-in-class precision drugs.

Not just Wood, entering 2025, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and many other technology giants have publicly expressed their optimism about the prospects of AI in biology. The medical and health field is undergoing an unprecedented change.

Beyond Moore's Law, a massive explosion of biological data

ARK Invest divides biological information into three levels: sequence - structure - system. The first level is mainly DNA/protein sequencing, the second level is played a core role by Alphafold, and the third level is represented by single-cell genomics.

Breakthroughs in sequencing technology have made it possible for researchers to obtain and analyze large amounts of biological data at a lower cost. The report shows that in the past 35 years, the cost of DNA sequencing has dropped by 10 billion times, and the cost of DNA synthesis has dropped by 100,000 times, much faster than Moore's Law.

An intuitive case is that the calculation time for the human genome has been shortened from 180 days in 2001 to 10 minutes now. The cost of analyzing a single genome at that time can now analyze 1.4 billion genomes.

With the large-scale application of sequencing technology, ARK Invest predicts that the amount of biological data will surge by 1,000 times or more in the future.

In addition to DNA, sequencing technology for cells is also constantly developing. The cost of single-cell sequencing is declining exponentially. The cost per cell has dropped from US$400 in 2009 to US$0.01 currently.

The report predicts that in the future, the virtual cell basic model will continue to reduce the cost of single-cell genomics, and is expected to be reduced by another 120 times by 2028.

Of course, in addition to sequencing technology, AI models represented by AlphaFold are redefining the prediction of molecular structures.

ARK Invest pointed out that AlphaFold has changed the prediction of protein structure, and its performance has greatly improved with version iterations, surpassing traditional methods such as X-ray crystallography and cryogenic electron microscopy in terms of productivity and scope.

The sharp drop in sequencing costs has brought about explosive growth in the total amount of biological data, which will bring endless impetus to the development of AI models.

Technological Disruptions: Four Fields Worth Paying Attention To

The combination of multi-omics technology and artificial intelligence will profoundly change medical care, including cancer diagnosis, drug research and development, etc. ARK Invest mentioned the following areas in the report:

1.Multi-Cancer Screening

Multi-cancer screening is a revolutionary cancer early detection method that can identify early signs of multiple cancers through a simple blood test, greatly improving the efficiency and scope of screening.

In July 2024, Guardant Health announced that the FDA had approved its Shield™ blood test technology for colorectal cancer screening in adults 45 years and older, becoming the first blood test approved by the FDA as a primary screening option for colorectal cancer.

ARK Invest believes that with the further smoothing of regulation and reimbursement pathways in the future, the widespread application of multi-cancer screening will more than double the overall size of the U.S. cancer screening market.

The current U.S. cancer early screening market is approximately US$80 billion, which means that multi-cancer screening is expected to drive market growth of nearly US$100 billion.

2.Virtual Cell

Virtual cells combine single-cell genomics and AI, aiming to simulate the functions of cells and predict responses in various states, and have huge application prospects.

For example, through virtual cells, researchers can predict what effects a specific drug will have on cells, reducing reliance on expensive and time-consuming wet experiments and accelerating the development process.

Not long ago, Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind and the new Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, also expressed his strong interest in "virtual cells", which he believes may revolutionize biological research.

Currently, companies such as 10x Genomics, FluentBio acquired by Illumina, ScaleBio and ParseBio are developing virtual cell-related technologies.

3. Self-Driving Labs

The Self-Driving Labs integrate multi-omics tools with analysis and design systems based on large language models(LLM), significantly improving experimental efficiency.

ARK Invest analyzes that Self-Driving Labs can save two years and hundreds of millions of dollars in costs during the drug discovery process.

As one of the pioneers of this approach, AI pharmaceutical company Recursion has achieved a 200-fold increase in productivity.

4. Organs-on-chips (OoCs)

Based on breakthroughs in microfluidic technology, 3D bioprinting technology and organoid technology, next-generation preclinical models, such as organ-on-a-chip (OOAC), are being developed.

The report stated that compared with traditional technologies such as animal models, organ chips are more physiologically consistent, scalable, and can support higher-throughput testing.

Furthermore, the combination of organ chips and artificial intelligence can provide accurate predictions for patients, thereby significantly improving the drug discovery process.

The medical version of the AI ​​war begins

However, with the release of large models such as DeepSeek, the hardware cost of the global AI market has been significantly reduced, the AI ​​medical market has developed rapidly, and industry competition has become increasingly fierce.

On the one hand, emerging medical enterprises have rapidly risen by virtue of technological innovation and professional accumulation, gradually making a name for themselves in the field of AI - powered healthcare. On the other hand, traditional medical and technology companies have also increased their investment in AI - powered healthcare, including manufacturers like Siemens, GE Healthcare, and Medtronic.

AI medical care is about to enter a stage of fierce competition.

As the industry develops, the concentration of the AI ​​medical market will gradually increase. AI technology will be the underlying architecture of all companies. Therefore, each subcategory will have a winner-take-all situation. Companies with differentiated technical advantages and market resources will occupy a larger market share, and the industry pattern will become clearer.