April 9, 2024
Harry's guest this week is Raffi Krikorian, chief technology officer and managing director at Emerson Collective, the social change organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs. Krikorian is the former vice president of engineering at Twitter (now X), where he was responsible for getting rid of the Fail Whale and making the company’s backend infrastructure more reliable; the former director of Uber's Advanced Technology Center in Pittsburgh, where he oversaw the launch of the world's first fleet of self-driving cars; and then the chief technology officer at the Democratic National Committee, where he helped rebuild the party's technology infrastructure after the Russian hacking debacle of 2016. At Emerson Collective, Krikorian built the technology organization, leads the development of data products, and works to upgrade the back offices of the non-profits Emerson works with. On top of all that, he recently launched a podcast called Technically Optimistic, where he’s taking a deep dive into the way AI is challenging us all to think differently about the future of work, education, policy, regulation, creativity, copyright, and many other areas. The show is a must-listen for anyone who cares about how we can build on AI to transform society for the better while minimizing the collateral damage. Harry talked with Krikorian about why he moved to Emerson Collective, why and how he started the podcast, and what he really thinks about what government should be doing to prepare for the waves of social change AI will bring.
59 min 27 sec
10.26.21
Many of us wear wireless, battery-powered medical sensors on our wrists in the form of our smartwatches or fitness trackers. But someday soon, similar sensors may be woven into our very clothing. Harry's guest this week, Nanowear CEO Venk Varadan, explains that his company's microscopic nanosensors, when embedded in fabric and worn against the skin, can pick up electrical changes that reveal heart rate, heart rhythms, respiration rate, and physical activity and relay the information to doctors in real time. Nanowear’s leading product is a sash called SimpleSense that fits over the shoulder and around the torso, and last month the company won FDA approval for the software package that goes with the SimpleSense sash and turns it into a diagnostic and predictive device.
53 min 25 sec
10.12.21
Today we bring you the second half of Harry's conversation with Dave deBronkart, better known as E-Patient Dave for all the work he’s done to help empower patients to be more involved in their own healthcare. In Part 1, we talked about how Dave’s own brush with cancer in 2007 turned him from a regular patient into a kind of super-patient, doing the kind of research to find the medication that ultimately saved his life. And we heard from Dave how the healthcare system in the late 2000s was completely unprepared to help consumers like him who want to access and understand their own data. Today in Part 2, we’ll talk about how all of that is gradually changing, and why new technologies and standards have the potential to open up a new era of participatory medicine – if, that is, patients are willing to do a little more work to understand their health data, if innovators can get better access to that data, and if doctors are willing to create a partnership with the patients over the process of diagnosis and treatment.
44 min 54 sec
9.28.21
The podcast is back with a new name and a new, expanded focus! Harry will soon be publishing his new book "The Future You: How Artificial Intelligence Can Help You Get Healthier, Stress Less, and Live Longer." Like his previous book "MoneyBall Medicine," it's all about AI and the other big technologies that are transforming healthcare. But this time Harry takes the consumer's point of view, sharing tips, techniques, and insights we can all use to become smarter, more proactive participants in our own health. The show's first guest under this expanded mission is Dave deBronkart, better known as "E-Patient Dave" for his relentless efforts since 2007 to persuade medical providers to cede control over health data and make patients into more equal partners in their own care.
51 min 13 sec
9.14.21
Harry's guest this week is Matthew Might, director of the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Might trained as a computer scientist, but a personal odyssey inspired him to make the switch into precision medicine. Now he uses computational tools such as knowledge graphs and natural language processing to find existing drug compounds that might help cure people with rare genetic disorders.
48 min 55 sec
8.31.21
This week Harry is joined by Kevin Davies, author of the 2020 book Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing. CRISPR—an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats—consists of DNA sequences that evolved to help bacteria recognize and defend against viral invaders, as a kind of primitive immune system. Thanks to its ability to precisely detect and cut other DNA sequences, CRISPR has spread to labs across the world in the nine years since Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier published a groundbreaking 2012 Science paper describing how the process works.
67 min 12 sec
8.17.21
Harry traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area this summer, and while there he interviewed the co-founders of three local data-driven diagnostics and drug discovery startups, all of whom participated in the same graduate program: the Biomedical Informatics Program at Stanford's School of Medicine. Joining Harry were Aria Pharmaceuticals co-founder and CEO Andrew Radin, BigHat Biosciences co-founder and chief scientific officer Peyton Greenside, and Inflammatix co-founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. The conversation covered how each company's work to advance healthcare and therapeutics rests on data and computation, and how the ideas, skills, connections each entrepreneur picked up at Stanford have played into their startups and their careers.
50 min 38 sec
8.3.21
Harry's guest this week is Jeff Elton, CEO of a Boston-based startup called Concert AI that's working to bring more "real-world data" and "real-world evidence" into the process of drug development. What's real-world data? It's everything about patients' health that's not included in the narrow outcomes measured by randomized, controlled clinical trials. By collecting, organizing, and analyzing it, Elton argues, pharmaceutical makers can it design better clinical trials, get drugs approved faster, and—after approval—learn who's really benefiting from a new medicine, and how.
47 min 37 sec
7.20.21
In a companion interview to his June 7 talk with Stanford's Michael Snyder, Harry speaks this week with Noosheen Hashemi, who—with Snyder—co-founded the personalized health startup January.ai in 2017. The company focuses on helping users understand how their bodies respond to different foods and activities, so they can make diet and exercise choices that help them avoid unhealthy spikes in blood glucose levels.
49 min 21 sec
7.6.21
This week Harry sits down with Vangelis Vergetis, the co-founder and co-executive director of Intelligencia, a startup that uses big data and machine learning to help pharmaceutical companies make better decisions throughout the drug development process. Vergetis argues that if you put a group of pharma executives in a conference room, then add an extra chair for a machine-learning system, the whole group ends up smarter—and able to make more accurate predictions about which drug candidates will succeed and which will fail.
53 min 02 sec
6.21.21
From her TED talks and her appearances on PBS, geneticist Wendy Chung is known to millions of people as an expert on autism. But thanks to funding from the Simons Foundation, she’s also known to tens of thousands of people with autism and their families as the leader of history’s largest study of the genetics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It’s called SPARK, for Simons Foundation Powering Autism Research for Knowledge, and it's a big-data exercise of unprecedented proportions.
50 min 59 sec
6.7.21
Having helped to bring big data to genomics through the lab techniques he invented, such as RNA-Seq, the Stanford molecular biologist Michael Snyder is focused today on how to use data from devices to increase the human healthspan. Some cars have as many as 400 sensors, Snyder notes. "And you can't imagine driving your car around without a dashboard...Yet here we are as people, which are more important than cars, and we're all running around without any sensors on us, except for internal ones." To Snyder, smart watches and other wearable devices should become those sensors, feeding information to our smartphones, which can then be "the health dashboard for humans and just let us know how our health is doing." (You can sign up to participate in the Snyder lab's study of wearables and COVID-19 at https://innovations.stanford.edu/wearables.)
55 min 49 sec
5.24.21
Angeli Moeller is a molecular biologist, a neuroscientist, a systems biologist, and a data scientist all rolled into one—which makes her a perfect example of the kind of multidisciplinary executive needed for this new digital health ecosystem defined by big data, AI, and machine learning. She's a founding member of the Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, does extensive work for the nonprofit rare disease advocacy group Rare-X, and has spent almost five years managing global data assets and IT partnerships at Bayer. At the beginning of 2021 she became the head of international pharma informatics for Roche, the world’s largest drug company. Harry caught up with her on Zoom in February, and the conversation started with the role of informatics at Roche, but quickly expanded to cover all the areas where deep learning and other forms of AI and data science are transforming drug discovery and healthcare, and what life sciences entrepreneurs need to do to get on board.
57 min 41 sec
5.10.21
The discoveries medical researchers and drug developers can make are constrained by the kinds of questions they can ask of their data. Unfortunately, when it comes to clinical trial data, or gene expression data, or population health data, it feels like you need a PhD in computer science just to know which questions are "askable" and how to frame them. This week, Harry talks with the founders of a startup working to solve that problem.
47 min 03 sec
4.26.21
Richard Fox: Scaling Genome Editing To Drive The Industrial Bio-Economy
52 min 57 sec
4.12.21
Computers can interpret the text we type, and they’re getting better at understanding the words we speak. But they’re only starting to understanding the emotions we feel—whether that means anger, amusement, boredom, distraction, or anything else. This week Harry talks with Rana El Kaliouby, the co-founder and CEO of a Boston-based company called Affectiva that’s working to close that gap.
33 min 06 sec
3.29.21
Rapid and cheap DNA sequencing technology can tell us a lot about which genes a patient is carrying around, but it can't tell us when and where the instructions in those genes get carried out inside cells. Resolve Biosciences—headed by this week's guest, Jason Gammack—aims to solve that problem by scaling up a form of intracellular imaging it calls molecular cartography.
54 min 59 sec
3.15.21
Pek Lum, co-founder, and CEO of Auransa believes that a lot fewer drugs would fail in Phase 2 clinical trials if they were tested on the patients most predisposed to respond. The problem is finding the sub-populations of likely high-responders in advance and matching them up with promising drug compounds. That’s Auransa's specialty.
48 min 33 sec
3.1.21
This week Harry talks with Matteo Franceschetti, founder and CEO of the Khosla Ventures-backed startup Eight Sleep. The company' smart mattress, called the Pod, is one of the latest (and largest) entries in the burgeoning market for home digital-health devices.
34 min 05 sec
2.15.21
Michael Geer is co-founder and CSO (Chief Strategy Officer) of Humanity Health, a London-based startup that’s building an iPhone app and subscription service designed to help users slow or reverse their rate of aging. Geer’s co-founder Pete Ward has described the app as like “Waze for maximizing healthspan,” that is, their predicted years of healthy functioning. This week Harry grills Geer on the app’s features, the startup’s business model, and the argument for better integration of clinical and digital data into consumers’ everyday health decisions.
49 min 39 sec
2.1.21
This week on MoneyBall Medicine, Harry takes a field trip (literally!) into farming and agriculture. His guests are Al Eisaian co-founder and CEO of crop intelligence IntelinAir, and the company’s director of machine learning, Jennifer Hobbs. Intelinair’s AGMRI platform uses customized computer vision and deep learning algorithms to sift through terabytes of aerial image data, to help farmers identify problems like weeds or pests that can go undetected from the ground. The parallels to the digital transformation in healthcare aren't hard to spot.
55 min 50 sec
