If NASA simulate physics (with programming) precisely enough to accurately calculate what will happen when they send a rocket into space, can biologists simulate the human body to discover what will happen when, for example, new medicine is introduced to it?

Question

I was thinking a reinforcement learning algorithm could be a trained in a simulated environment to find a cure for cancer, testing how every which complex process of a new medicine or even nanotechnology might react to its environment. Am I way off?

In: Biology

Answer 1

As other posters say, biological creatures are extremely complicated (and vary widely between individuals), while a rocket in space is one of the easier to analyse physical models.

However, now computers are incredibly fast and sophisticated, ‘computational biology’ is becoming a thing. We are able to do useful work with simulations, but there are some limitations, so we still need to do lots of testing, but this is all changing very quickly.