Generative AI is going to change how we do things across the entire economy, including the fields Harry covers on the show, namely healthcare delivery, drug discovery, and drug development. But we’re still just starting to figure out exactly how it’s going to change things. For example, AI is already speeding up the process of discovering new biological targets for drugs and designing molecules to hit those targets—but whether that will actually lead to better medicines, or create a new generation of AI-driven pharmaceutical companies, are still unanswered questions.  One thing that’s for ..read more

If you learned that radiologists looking at CT scans for the traditional signs of coronary artery disease catch only 20 percent of the people who actually have a high risk of a heart attack, and if you learned that there’s a new AI-based test that can catch subtle signs of inflammation in the other 80 percent of patients—well, you’d probably want to get that test yourself, right? Harry's guests this week, Frank Cheng and Keith Channon, are from a UK-based company that has developed just such a test. Cheng is the company's CEO, and Channon is co-founder and chief medical officer. And under thei ..read more

If you look back at all the health-tech and drug development companies Harry has hosted on the show, an interesting pattern starts to emerge: a very large number of those companies have gone on to enormous growth and success in their markets. It could be that being on the podcast is like a catapult to success—or it could be that we're pretty good at finding companies that are already on a promising trajectory. Either way, there's no better example than Concert AI.  The company’s CEO, Jeff Elton, first spoke with Harry back in July of 2021. At that time, the company was already one of the ..read more

One of the most amazing successes in the battle against cancer over the last two decades has been the introduction of antibody drugs that harness the body’s own immune system to kill tumor cells. Finding those drugs may sound like a biology problem rather than a machine learning or a big-data problem. But actually, these days, it’s both. Harry's guest this week is Leonard Wossnig, who’s the chief technology officer for a UK company called LabGenius. The company uses a combination of synthetic biology, high-throughput assays, and machine learning to hunt for new drugs within a subclass of antib ..read more

The combination of better data and more powerful computing is helping researchers reinvent the process of discovering new drugs. Within 5-10 years, we’ll likely see a huge wave of new medicines that were either discovered or designed using AI—drugs that will finally help us get control of our most stubborn health problems, from cancer to cardiovascular disease to obesity and metabolic disorders to neurodegenerative diseases. And the biotech startups that will do most to contribute are the ones that have both proprietary data, and original ways to use AI to sift through that data. Harry's guest ..read more

There are about 30 trillion human cells in your body, but there are about 38 trillion bacterial cells, mostly hanging out in your large intestine. And that’s not even counting all the viruses, fungi, protists, and other microbial cells that live on your skin, in your bloodstream, and all around your body. So in effect, what you think of as you is not really you. You’re actually a walking colony of many different organisms. All of which cooperate peacefully, for the most part—unless the balance goes awry, and then you can get very sick, very fast. The microbiome has been getting more and m ..read more

Quality control is one of those things that only a select few people pay attention to—until something goes wrong, then everyone cares. That's especially true in the drug manufacturing industry, where episodes like cross-contamination in a drug factory can shut down a production line and create instant shortages of important medicines. And if a contaminated medicines ever does get shipped out to clinics or stores, people’s lives can be at stake. So drug makers are usually pretty receptive toward any new technology that can help them detect manufacturing problems before they get out of hand. Tha ..read more

There’s a lot of talk out there about how artificial intelligence will change the way doctors and nurses take care of patients; you hear some of it right here on this show. But all of that still feels like a forecast rather than a present reality. When you look really closely, it’s hard to find concrete examples where AI is already helping healthcare providers make better decisions that improve patient outcomes and take costs out of the system. That’s why Harry wanted to have Nassib Chamoun on the show. Chamoun is the founder and CEO of Health Data Analytics Institute (HDAI), which has been wo ..read more

There’s a good chance that we’re all going to live a lot longer than we think. Or at least, that’s what Harry's guest Sergey Young argues in his book The Science and Technology of Growing Young. Young is an investor who leads a $100 million venture capital fund called the Longevity Vision Fund, and through his investing, he says he meets innovators who are coming up with the technologies that will extend our healthy lifespans not just by years but by decades. Those technologies include better drugs, of course, but also gene editing to rejuvenate our DNA and methods for regenerating or replacin ..read more

It's practically the theme of our show that AI is going to change almost everything about the way drugs get developed and the way healthcare gets delivered. But there’s probably nobody better placed to see how this transformation is already happening than Harry's guest this week, Scott Penberthy.  Scott works at Google Cloud, where he’s the director of Applied AI in the Office of the CTO. He and his team work with Google’s big corporate customers, including a variety of customers in healthcare and pharmaceutical R&D, to help them solve business problems that require large-scale c ..read more