I’m a solo developer with a growing interest in how AI technologies can help fight disease and improve lives.
Recently, I’ve been inspired by groundbreaking projects like AlphaFold, which show real promise in addressing complex and previously untreatable illnesses.
But it also made me wonder: “Is there any meaningful way that someone like me—a solo developer without a medical background or institutional affiliation—can actually contribute to this progress?”
I may not have advanced knowledge in medicine or work at a major research lab,
but if there’s even a small way that my skills could support others,
I would be deeply grateful to be part of that impact.
If you have ideas, suggestions, or experience as a developer working in this space,
please feel free to share or recommend a direction.
Without knowing what skills are you offering it is a bit difficult, but if you are into something related to data science there are probably some open source projects used in research where you could contribute, like openfold.
Actually this is the kind of question that maybe chatgpt will answer you better than most of us.
Open a prompt where you state what kind of skills do you have, and ask it to tell you if there are any open source projects where you could contribute to.
Then you can slowly try to dive into the project open issues to have a general idea if the knowledge you have could perhaps help into solving technical problems that often might not require advanced medical knowledge.
Get as many job ads of medical AI companies and look up what kind of technology the candidates should have.
get started on simple projects with data from kaggle - there are some datasets for example when it comes to biomarkers and cancer cells.
Get into learning. You may not study medicine at a university - but there are no real secrets anymore. You can start studying medicine by yourself. Why not start with the brain.
Get a list of all the components a brain consists of
read publications
register yourself for conferences in fields you may find interesting
Get a mini laboratory. A DIY nano particle lab can be build for ~1-2k$
(combine that with the kaggle datasets, and train a LLM that transforms text into chemical reactions and lur cancer cells into a nano gel and extract that or cut of the cancer cells food source and lur it into that… why not start with mice and rats… I am sure you find a way to make them have cancer).
Get into contact with doctors and patients e.g. by voluntaring to help in a hospital
There are also more and more tools coming up that monitor health. You can build something like that too. For example sensor data that is collected let it be pulse, bloodpressure, bloodsugar (e.g. Omnipod) or why not us Brain to Machine interfaces (https://www.emotiv.com/), etc…
look up deseases that are not very common. Because I think that’s the most rewarding thing you could do. Big Pharma will not work in that field. You can look up for websites of patience and ask them if they could give you contact to their doctor. I am sure they would appreciate some help.
pubmed, snomed. Try to get the databases. Build a basic RAG based on them.
Put that on medium. Put a website online where you show your progress on your own small experiments.
go to linkedin, lookup data scientists who work in medicine field. Look up what they have been publishing. Try to understand it. Find flaws, let that be fact checked (this forum is ideal for that - I am sure many guys here work in that field)
also on linkedin: post some things that you are building there. It won’t take more than 2 years until some doctors will reach out. Because they would also like to go into that field but they have no idea how tech works
There is nothing stopping you to do some experiments (do not try that on living creatures please).
