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
1.18.21
What if there were a single company that could connect hospital electronic health record systems to a massive genomic testing and analytics platform? It would be a little like Amazon Web Services (AWS) for healthcare—an enabling platform for anyone who wants to deploy precision medicine at scale. That’s exactly what Joel Dudley says he’s now helping to build at Tempus.
52 min 32 sec
1.4.21
This week Harry catches up with Christine Lemke from Evidation Health, a startup in San Mateo, CA, that helps drug developers and other organizations analyze the effectiveness of smart devices and wearables in new types of therapies.
39 min 17 sec
11.23.20
This week Thomas Chittenden of Genuity Science tells Harry about the company's work to use the power of causal statistical learning, Bayesian belief networks, and other advanced math techniques to understand that cascading gene interactions that account for health and disease—and translate them into insights that can provide drug makers with new targets.
54 min 38 sec
8.31.20
Harry welcomes back Andrew A. Radin, CEO of the drug discovery startup twoXAR, where scientists model pathogenesis computationally to identify potential drug molecules and, ideally shaving years off the drug development process.
57 min 29 sec
8.20.20
In this week's show Harry interviews Rayid Ghani, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who studies how to use AI and data science to model and influence people's behavior in realms like politics, healthcare, education, and criminal justice.
44 min 48 sec
8.3.20
This week Harry speaks with Oura CEO Harpreet Rai, who’s leading an effort to explore how a wearable sleep-monitoring device—the Oura Ring—can pick up patterns that may help diagnose COVID-19 infections and other problems.
46 min 42 sec
7.20.20
David Sable got his start in reproductive medicine in the late 1980s, a time when he says fertility treatments were “very primitive.” But by the mid-2000s, he says, new procedures and new insights into the genetics of development had changed everything. His subsequent time observing (and investing in) the field has convinced him that reproductive medicine is “the most interesting area of medicine this century.”
49 min 27 sec
6.29.20
This week Harry speaks with molecular geneticist Elli Papaemmanuil about how newly available genomic data could lead to major improvements in the standard of care for cancer patients, leading to an age of true precision medicine.
52 min 21 sec
6.17.20
This week Harry interviews Gregory Bowman, an associate professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular biophysics in the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. Bowman is the director of Folding@home, a distributed computing project currently focused on analyzing the structures of coronavirus proteins to find targets for new drug therapies that could help end the pandemic.
33 min 18 sec
6.5.20
Harry’s guest this week is the founder and CEO of a New Zealand firm, SaferMe, that had developed proximity-based smartphone apps for worker safety. When the coronavirus came along, their apps turned out to be a great way to help companies build their own “contact tables” to identify, test, and isolate SARS-CoV-2 carriers.
30 min 15 sec
5.22.20
This week Harry quizzes Ulo Palm, the senior vice president of digital sciences at Allergan, about the long and problematic reign of the p-value in statistical analysis, and why it may be time for the biopharma industry to look to more nuanced measures of whether a drug trial succeeded.
43 min 03 sec
4.16.20
Distributed Bio aims to use its computational antibody engineering platform to identify antibodies that protect against SARS and optimize them to block the SARS-CoV2 coronavirus. This week Harry gets an progress update from three key Distributed Bio scientists.
35 min 03 sec
3.10.20
Harry’s guest for this unusually frank and urgent episode is Jacob Glanville, the founding partner, CEO, and president of Distributed Bio. The company is using its skills in computational antibody analysis and optimization to help the drug industry develop new vaccines and antibody-based treatments for a range of diseases, potentially including the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
54 min 39 sec
3.3.20
Harry interviews Ramy Farid, president and CEO of Schrödinger Pharmaceuticals, about the company’s success using chemical simulation software to help drug makers zero in on promising drug candidates—and about its recent IPO, which brought in more than twice as much cash as the company expected.
28 min 50 sec
2.5.20
As the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak spreads in Asia, Harry speaks with Phil Febbo, the chief medical officer of Illumina, one of the world’s largest makers of equipment for high-throughput DNA sequencing. Febbo highlights sequencing’s emerging contribution to the understanding and treatment of infectious disease.
28 min 36 sec
1.29.20
Daniella Gilboa is an embryologist in Israel working to bring the power of AI and machine learning to the embryo selection phase of IVF treatment. She explains how her new startup aims to automate this error-ridden process, raising efficiency and lowering the overall cost of IVF.
30 min 55 sec
1.3.20
Harry’s guest this week is Tom Davenport, who argues that the healthcare industry is way behind in its use of big-data analytics software to make smarter decisions about business and patient care. “This is a period of lots of opportunity to use new technologies to change healthcare, and God knows we need it, from a value-for-expense standpoint,” Davenport tells Harry. “But we’re not really at the point, at least on the clinical side yet, where we see a lot of direct applications. We’re still in the age of compiling transaction data. We haven’t used it much yet to make decisions and take actions.”
31 min 53 sec
12.16.19
Harry welcomes Milind Kamkolkar back to the program. The former Sanofi exec is now the chief data and digital officer at Cellarity, a Flagship Pioneering-backed therapeutics startup working to model cell behavior computationally in order to identify new drug targets and therapies.
38 min 21 sec
11.26.19
This week Harry welcomes a guest who could be considered a "poster child" for the movement to incorporate more data into clinical practice: Dr. Alan Copperman, a New York-based specialist in reproductive medicine. He says the data generated by genetic screening of fertilized embryos is rapidly and dramatically improving outcomes for couples who want children.
27 min 14 sec
11.5.19
This week Harry talks with Gini Deshpande, the co-founder and CEO of San Mateo, CA-based NuMedii, a company making judicious use of big data and AI to speed up drug discovery.
28 min 33 sec
