Shows
The Harry Glorikian ShowRaffi Krikorian Says "We Don't Have Much Time Left" to Rein in AIHarry'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 af...
2024-04-0959 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowHow ActiveLoop Is Building the Back End for Generative AIGenerative 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 sure is t...
2024-03-261h 02
The Harry Glorikian ShowHow Caristo is Using AI to Reduce Heart Attack RiskIf 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...
2024-03-121h 04
The Harry Glorikian ShowWhy Deep Origin Is Betting on Both Physics and AI for Drug DiscoveryInvestors and companies in the life science industry have been betting a lot of money over the last few years on a single idea: that computation will help us get a lot better at developing new drugs. But the word “computation” covers a pretty broad range of techniques. And the reason that there are dozens if not hundreds of computational drug discovery startups popping up is that everyone has their own hypothesis about what specific kind of computation is going to be the most powerful.For example, you might be convinced that the most important thing is to u...
2024-02-2751 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowHow ConcertAI Came to Lead in Cancer DataIf 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 th...
2024-01-301h 00
The Harry Glorikian ShowT Cell Engagers: The New Cancer Drug?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 subcla...
2024-01-1638 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowHow Pangea Is Using AI to Find New CNS Drugs in NatureThe 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 guests this week...
2023-12-1958 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowAI and Microbiomes 101 with JonaThere 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 mic...
2023-12-0554 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowModicus Prime Safeguards Drug ManufacturingQuality 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.That...
2023-11-2144 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowAI Isn't Magic, But It Can Save Lives, says HDAI's Nassib ChamounThere’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...
2023-11-071h 12
The Harry Glorikian ShowWe Can All Live to 120...and BeyondThere’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 me...
2023-10-2458 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowScott Penberthy & Google AI for HealthcareIt'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...
2023-10-101h 20
The Harry Glorikian ShowHow to Build a Medtech Startup in High SchoolBuilding any kind of startup is hard. Starting a business in healthcare or medical technology is even more challenging, given the long timelines for product development and all the regulatory requirements companies have to meet. But imagine how much harder it would be to start a company if you were still just a senior in high school! Recently Harry learned about a company called Vytal that’s building eye-tracking technology to measure brain health, and he knew he wanted to have the co-founders on the show. Not just because the technology is interesting, but because CEO Rohan Kal...
2023-09-2640 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowHow exponential growth is changing the worldIf you’re looking for help thinking about the implications of exponential change in all areas of technology, one of the best people you can turn to is Azeem Azhar. He's a writer, entrepreneur, and investor who publishes the incredibly popular and influential Substack newsletter Exponential View, which takes deep dives into AI and other subjects with world experts. In 2021 Azeem published a whole book along the same lines called The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics, and Society, and he joined Harry on the show in early 2022 to talk about that. This summer, the book ca...
2023-09-1256 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowHow to make Generative AI in Healthcare Safe, with Huma.ai's Lana FengIt’s been less than a year since OpenAI opened up ChatGPT to the general public, and less than six months since OpenAI introduced GPT-4, the large language model that currently powers ChatGPT. But in that brief time, the new crop of generative AI tools from OpenAI and competitors like Google and Anthropic has already started to transform the way we think about managing information. We’re entering an era when machines can generate, organize, and access information with a level of accuracy, speed, and originality that matches or exceeds the abilities of humans.That doesn’t mean m...
2023-08-2949 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowHandheld Ultrasound by Butterfly Network: Faster, Cheaper, BetterHarry's guest this week is Joe DeVivo, the new CEO of Butterfly Network. The company's goal is to make it radically easier for doctors or medical technicians to perform an ultrasound exam on any part of the body, and radically cheaper for a patient to get one. The companyt makes an FDA-cleared, handheld ultrasound scanner called the Butterfly iQ. The first big thing that’s different about the iQ is that it uses silicon-based microelectromechanical sensors, instead of a traditional piezoelectric crystal element, to generate and receive the ultrasound waves. That means the device is fully digital, rather than an...
2023-08-1553 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowAHA: Ask Harry Anything!This week Harry's guest is....Harry! We're flipping the script and giving Harry a chance to wax eloquent about AI in healthcare and drug research, the growing role of personal health monitoring devices, the unique features of the Boston life science ecosystem, the meaning of the recent downturn in biotech investment, the most common mistakes made by new entrepreneurs, and much more. This week's guest interviewer is Wade Roush, who hosts the tech-and-culture podcast Soonish and has been the behind-the-scenes producer of The Harry Glorikian Show ever since Harry started the show in 2018.For a full transcript...
2023-08-011h 05
The Harry Glorikian ShowDebunking large language models in healthcare with Isaac KohaneHarry's guest this week is Dr. Isaac Kohane, chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the new book The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond. Large language models such as GPT-4 are obviously starting to change industries like search, advertising, and customer service—but Dr. Kohane says they're also quickly becoming indispensable reference tools and office helpmates for doctors. It's easy to see why, since GPT-4 and its ilk can offer high-quality medical insights, and can also quickly auto-generate text such as prior authorization, lowering doctors' daily paperwork burden. But it's al...
2023-07-1858 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowNon-standard Amino Acids in the Development of New Medical TherapiesIn the same way that written English is built around an alphabet of just 26 letters, all life on Earth is built around a standard set of just 20 amino acids, which are the building blocks of all proteins. And just as we've invented special characters like emoji to go beyond our standard letters, it turns out that biologists can expand their repertoire of powers using non-standard amino acids—those that either occur rarely in nature, or that can only be made in the lab. GRO Biosciences, a spinout from the laboratory of the renowned synthetic biology pioneer George Church at Ha...
2023-07-051h 00
The Harry Glorikian ShowDog Cancer Cure: Fidocure by Christina Kelly LopesOwning a dog can be a joy, but one sad downside is that dogs are highly prone to cancer—six million of them are diagnosed with the disease in the U.S. each year. Harry's guest this week, Christina Lopes, is co-founder and CEO of a company called One Health that's working to improve cancer outcomes for our canine friends. The company offers a precision cancer diagnosis and treatment service called FidoCure that takes what we’ve learned about genomic testing of tumors in humans and uses it in veterinary clinics. Vets can submit a dog’s tumor sample for DN...
2023-06-201h 01
The Harry Glorikian ShowHow Beacon Biosignals Brings Precision Medicine in Neurology to the BrainUnlike cancer, brain diseases like epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, or depression don't tend to have easily measured biomarkers that could help doctors tailor treatments, or that could help researchers develop more effective drugs. So in neurology and psychiatry, the precision medicine revolution hasn't really arrived yet. But Beacon Biosignals, where Harry's guest Jacob Donoghue is the co-founder and CEO, is trying to change all that. Beacon is focused on making electroencephalography into a more reliable and useful data source for diagnosing and treating neurological disease. EEG is a non-invasive way to measure electrical activity in the brain, and i...
2023-06-0642 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowYour Next Doctor is a Chatbot? Language Models, Google Researchers, & MedPaLM-2Large language models are already changing the business of search. But now they’re about to change the practice of medicine. Harry's guests, Vivek Natarajan and Shek Azizi, are both researchers on the Health AI team at Google, where they're pushing the boundaries of what large language models can achieve in specialized domains like health. This spring their team announced it would start rolling out a new large language model called Med-PaLM 2 that’s designed to answer medical questions with high accuracy. (The model got an 85 percent score on the U.S. Medical License Exam, the test all doctors have...
2023-05-231h 00
The Harry Glorikian ShowGoing Boldly into Biomanufacturing and Bioeconomy with InscriptaHarry's guests this week are Sri Kosaraju, the CEO of Inscripta, and Richard Fox, a former Inscripta scientist who just rejoined the company as its SVP of Synthetic Biology. In reabsorbing Infinome—the Inscripta spinout Fox described to Harry in a spring 2021 episode of the show—Inscripta is placing a big bet on biomanufacturing, the creation and fermentation of genetically customized microbes that can pump out medical, agricultural, and nutraceutical products, and more. Inscripta had previously focused on a benchtop "bio-foundry" machine called Onyx that that makes programmed edits to bacterial or yeast cells at thousands of diffe...
2023-05-0955 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowDrug Discovery with 1910 Genetics: Knowing Your ToolsHarry's guest this week, Jen Nwankwo, is the founder and CEO of a drug discovery company in Boston called 1910 Genetics. Her PhD is in pharmacology, which shows through in her practical focus on fixing the drug discovery process to get more and better therapies into the hands of doctors. To hear Jen tell it, 1910 Genetics is focused on finding the most promising new drug candidates for stubborn health problems—and it takes a refreshingly agnostic approach to everything else. The company doesn’t hunt for just small-molecule drugs or just protein therapies. It explores both. It doesn’t utili...
2023-04-2549 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowCry Me a Biomarker: Using Tears to Screen for CancerTears are a signal of more than just our emotions. The liquid in tears comes from blood plasma, and contains a lot of the same proteins and other biomolecules that circulate in the bloodstream. But what this liquid doesn’t have are a lot of the extra components like antibodies that would get in the way if you were looking for specific biomarkers—such as the low-molecular-weight proteins released as a byproduct of the inflammation around tumors. Harry's guests Anna Daily and Omid Moghadam are from a startup called Namida Lab that’s the first company to market...
2023-04-1142 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowInsilico Brings Generative AI to Drug Development and DiscoveryIt may feel like generative AI technology suddenly burst onto the scene over the last year or two, with the appearance of text-to-image models like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion, or chatbots like ChatGPT that can churn out astonishingly convincing text thanks to the power of large language models. But in fact, the real work on generative AI has been happening in the background, in small increments, for many years. One demonstration of that comes from Insilico Medicine, where Harry's guest this week, Alex Zhavoronkov, is the co-CEO. Since at least 2016, Zhavoronkov has been publishing papers about the p...
2023-03-281h 29
The Harry Glorikian ShowRaphael Townshend on The Power of Small Molecule DrugsThere have been a lot of stories in the news over the last few months about AI chatbots like ChatGPT that can respond to your questions with convincing and well-written answers. These so-called large language models can tell you how to build a treehouse, how to bake a cake, or how to sleep better. But notice that word large. Behind the scenes, these models have learned which word tend to cluster together by sifting through hundreds of billions of pieces of data—basically the entire Internet, in the cast of ChatGPT, including all of Wikipedia and thousands of published bo...
2023-03-1442 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowHow the Glaucomfleckens are Humanizing Medicine, One Laugh at a TimeThe medical news publication STAT calls Will Flanary “the Internet’s funniest doctor.” The guests we bring on the show usually talk about how technology is changing healthcare, but Will and his wife Kristin are changing healthcare in a very different way—through comedy. A former standup comic who trained as an ophthalmologist and runs a successful ophthalmology practice in Oregon City, Oregon, Will is better known by his alter ego “Dr. Glaucomflecken.” His short videos have millions of views on YouTube and TikTok, and feature a cast of quirky characters, all played by Will himself, who lightly satirize medical cult...
2023-02-2849 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowStephen Kingsmore's Quest to Test Every Baby with Genome SequencingThere's a quiet revolution happening in the field of genetic screening of newborns. Within the last couple of years it’s become possible to sequence the entire genome of a newborn baby, all six billion base pairs of DNA, and diagnose potential genetic disorders in about 7 hours. That’s already happening in a handful of hospitals, with a focus on babies who are showing symptoms of rare genetic disorders. But within five years, says Harry's guest, Dr. Stephen Kingsmore, it should be possible to extend this rapid whole-genome sequencing to every baby in every hospital, whether they’re showing sympto...
2023-02-1442 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowArterys Medical Imaging Jumpstarts the AI Revolution in RadiologyLast October, medical imaging company Arterys announced that it had been acquired by healthcare AI giant Tempus. That caught our attention here at The Harry Glorikian Show, because back in the fall of 2018—exactly 100 episodes ago, as it turns out—we welcomed Arterys co-founder and CEO Fabien Beckers as our guest. At the time, Arterys had recently won FDA clearance for a cloud-based software platform that used deep learning to help radiologists automatically locate the contours of the ventricles of the heart. The company would go on to apply similar technology to MRI and CT images of all s...
2023-01-3127 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowMeasuring brain activity - Ryan Field on the Harry Glorikian ShowYou can wear an Oura ring or a WHOOP armband to tell you how your body is adapting to exercise. A continuous glucose monitor can send your phone information about your blood sugar levels are changing. And during the pandemic, a lot of people bought home pulse oximeters to monitor their blood oxygenation levels. But there’s one part of the body where home health sensors haven’t reached yet, and that’s our brains. They're protected inside our thick skulls, which means it’s pretty hard to measure what’s going on in there. Until recently, the only real instr...
2023-01-1757 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowGrail's Josh Ofman on the Revolution of Cancer ScreeningOut of all the dozens of types of cancer that occur in humans, we habitually screen for only five: breast, cervical, colon, prostate, and lung. But what if there were a single test that could detect 50 types of cancer, based on a simple blood draw? That's exactly what's possible today, thanks to the Galleri test, introduced by Illumina spinoff Grail in 2021. The $949 test, which won breakthrough designation from the FDA in 2019, uses machine learning to assess the patterns of methyl groups—molecules that attach to chromosomes and control gene activity—in free-floating DNA shed by tumors. This week...
2023-01-031h 03
The Harry Glorikian ShowCarlos Ciller – AI Is The Window To The Soul At RetinAIThese days, there's an explosion of digital imaging technology for almost every part of the body. There are the familiar types of imaging everyone knows, like CT scans, MRIs, ultrasound, and of course, X-rays. But now doctors and medical researchers are also exploring newer types of digital imaging technology, such as Optical Coherence Tomography, or OCT.OCT uses near-infrared light that penetrates just a couple of millimeters into a tissue such as an artery wall or the retina of the eye. By collecting the light that scatters back, OCT can produce an incredibly high-resolution cross section or...
2022-12-201h 00
The Harry Glorikian ShowJanuary's Noosheen Hashemi on Preventing Diabetes by Promoting Gut HealthThere are many causes for diabetes—chronicallly high blood sugar—but there’s also a growing list of ways to prevent it, or manage it once it starts. Wearable technologies like continuous glucose monitors or CGMs are high on that list. These devices have tiny needles that penetrate the skin and measure glucose levels in the interstitial fluid between cells. They can send that data to a smartphone, where apps made by a variety of companies can record it and analyze it.January.ai is one such company, and co-founder and CEO Noosheen Hashemi joined Harry on the sh...
2022-12-0646 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowAt Univfy, Mylene Yao Is Making IVF More Predictable and AffordableAbout half a million babies are born every year through IVF. That number would probably be a lot higher if the procedure were cheaper and more accessible—but making that happen would mean transforming IVF from an artisanal craft into something more like a modern automated factory, with AI helping doctors and technicians make faster and better decisions at every step. And that’s exactly what Harry's guest Mylene Yao, the co-founder of Univfy, is doing. Univfy helps patients with two aspects of the IVF process. The first is using machine learning to provide patients with a more a...
2022-11-2256 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowEpisode 100! Illumina's Phil Febbo on the New Era of Low-Cost Genome SequencingFor the 100th episode of The Harry Glorikian Show, Harry welcomes Phil Febbo, chief medical officer at Illumina. The San Diego-based company is the leading maker of the high-speed gene sequencing machines that are at the core of the precision medicine revolution. The company has an 80 percent market share, which means that if you or your loved one has had any sequencing done for any reason, chances are your samples were sequenced on an Illumina machine. Gene sequencing is already a key part of both diagnostics and treatment decisions for many disease, but its use is only going to...
2022-11-0852 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowDavid Sable is Still Working on Making IVF More AccessibleIn 1978, Louise Joy Brown was celebrated as the world's first "test tube baby," born as the result of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Today, Brown is 44 years old, and what was a technological triumph in 1978 is almost routine today, with half a million babies born every through IVF. But Harry's guest this week, gynecologist and investor David Sable, thinks IVF still isn’t nearly as reliable or accessible as it should be. From his studies of infertility services, he’s convinced that society is on the cusp of bringing down the cost and raising the success rate of IVF, so that...
2022-10-251h 04The Harry Glorikian ShowHow H1 Is Networking the Healthcare World, with Ariel Katz“LinkedIn meets ZoomInfo meets Zocdoc, but for doctors." That’s how H1 co-founder and CEO Ariel Katz describes the information service his company offers. It's a response to the fact that the healthcare is incredibly fragmented, with no central database or platform that everyone can use to share their professional profiles and get in touch with colleagues. (Physicians never adopted LinkedIn for this kind of networking because they just don’t switch jobs very often.) Without a central directory, patients can have a hard time find the right doctors, and doctors can have a hard time finding each other—say, whe...
2022-10-1135 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowErwin Seinen Says the Paper Lab Notebook Is Finally Dying with eLabNextIf you walked into a typical life science research lab at a university or a biotech startup, you might be surprised to see how much paper is still laying around. A lot of researchers still keep records of their experiments and studies in paper notebooks—in fact, along with doctor’s offices, life sciences labs might be one of the last bastions of professional life that surrenders to digitization. But these labs are surrendering. And Harry's guest this week, Erwin Seinen, is helping to accelerate that shift. He’s the founder and CEO of a company called eLabNex...
2022-09-2744 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowHow Rune Labs Uses Data to Improve Prospects for Parkinson's PatientsHarry's guest this week, Brian Pepin, says there haven’t really been any advances in the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease in a decade. The standard treatment is still the standard treatment—meaning various drugs to replace dopamine in the brain, since the loss of neurons that produce dopamine is one of the hallmarks of the disease.But there has been one important change during that decade. Thanks to new technologies, ranging from wearables like the Apple Watch to sophisticated deep brain implants from companies like Medtronic, we’re now able to gather a lot more data about wh...
2022-09-1351 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowProscia Pushes Pathology Down the Digital PathIn most hospitals, the practice of radiology went digital years ago. Today you'll rarely find a radiologist examining a broken bone or a fluid-filled lung on a sheet of old-fashioned X-ray film. But pathology isn't as computerized. For a variety of cultural, technical, and regulatory reasons, many pathologists still prefer to look at tissue samples the old-fashioned way, on a slide under a microscope.Philadelpha-based Proscia is working to change that—and open up pathology to the power of remote work and automated image analysis—by building a cloud-based infrastructure for storing and sharing scanned pathology images. Harr...
2022-08-3056 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowVibrent Health - the Catalyst for Mobile HealthcareWe use our smartphones to communicate, shop, navigate, watch videos, take pictures, share our lives on social media, track our exercise, and listen to music and podcasts. So why shouldn’t they also be the main interface to our healthcare experiences? That’s the question P.J. Jain started out with in 2010 when he left behind a career in networking and telecommunications to start a company dedicated to mobile health. Called Vibrent Health, the company went on to win a game-changing contract in 2015 to help the National Institutes of Health build a mobile data-gathering infrastructure for a giant research prog...
2022-08-1658 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowLife Science Labs Can't Be Automated, But They Can Be OrchestratedWet labs at life science companies look and work the same pretty much everywhere. They're full of incubators, refrigerators, centrifuges, liquid handlers, gene sequencers, DNA and RNA synthesizers, and all sorts of other complex equipment. And a lot of these machines are automated—but the larger workflow in a life sciences R&D lab is very much not automated. For the most part it’s individual researchers who decide how and when to use each piece of equipment, and individuals who move samples and materials back and forth between the machines. And that's a problem, because if you’re trying...
2022-08-0258 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowRare-X Wants to Build the Data Infrastructure for Rare Disease ResearchFor people with common health problems like diabetes or high blood pressure or high cholesterol, progress in pharmaceuticals has worked wonders and extended lifespans enormously. But there’s another category of people who tend to get overlooked by the drug industry: patients with rare genetic disorders that affect only one in a thousand or one in two thousand people. If you add up all the different rare genetic disorders known to medicine, it’s a very large number; Harry's guest this week, Charlene Son Rigby, says there may be as many as 10,000 separate genetic disorders affecting as many as 30 mill...
2022-07-1957 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowHow WHOOP Uses Big Data to Optimize Your Fitness and HealthMost fitness gadgets, like the Fitbit or the Apple Watch, encourage you to get out there every day and “close your rings” or “do your 10,000 steps.” But there’s one activity tracker that’s a little different. The WHOOP isn't designed to tell you when to work out—it’s designed to tell you when to stop. Harry's guest this week is Emily Capodilupo, the senior vice president of data science and research at Boston-based WHOOP, which is based here in Boston. To explain why the company focuses on measuring what it calls strain, rather than counting steps or calories...
2022-07-0556 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowHow RxRevu is Fixing the Disconnect Between Your Doctor and Your PharmacyWhen your doctor prescribes a new medicine, there's a pretty good chance that some snafu will crop up before you get it filled. Either your pharmacy doesn't carry it, or your insurance provider won't cover it, or they'll say you need "prior authorization," or your out-of-pocket cost will be sky-high. The basic problem is that the electronic health record systems and e-prescribing systems at your doctor’s office don’t include price and benefit information for prescription drugs. All of that information lives on separate systems at your insurance company and your health plan’s pharmacy benefit manager, or PBM. A...
2022-06-2134 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowEric Daimler at Conexus says Forget Calculus, Today's Coders Need to Know Category TheoryHarry's guest Eric Daimler, a serial software entrepreneur and a former Presidential Innovation Fellow in the Obama Administration, has an interesting argument about math. If you’re a young person today trying to decide which math course you’re going to take—or maybe an old person who just wants to brush up—he says you shouldn’t bother with trigonometry or calculus. Instead he says you should study category theory. An increasingly important in computer science, category theory is about the relationships between sets or structures. It can be used to prove that different structures are consistent or compatible...
2022-06-0756 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowLokavant Wants to Help Good Drugs Succeed in Clinical Trials, and Help Bad Ones Fail FasterHarry's guest this week is Rohit Nambisan, CEO of Lokavant, a company that helps drug developers get a better picture of how their clinical trials are progressing. He explains the need for the company's services with an interesting analogy: these days, Nambisan points out, you can use an app like GrubHub to order a pizza for $20 or $25, and the app will give you a real-time, minute by minute accounting of where the pizza is and when it’s going to arrive at your door. But f you’re a pharmaceutical company running a clinical trial for a new drug, you...
2022-05-2451 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowWhat Kids Can Learn from Social Robots, with Paolo PirjanianThis week Harry continues to explore advances in "digital therapeutics" in a conversation with Paolo Pirjanian, the founder and CEO of the robotics company Embodied. They’ve created an 8-pound, 16-inch-high robot called Moxie that’s intended as a kind of substitute therapist that can help kids with their social-emotional learning. Moxie draws on some of the same voice-recognition and voice-synthesis technologies found in digital assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Home, but it also has an expressive body and face designed to make it more engaging for kids. The device hit the market in 2020, and parents are already sayi...
2022-05-1052 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowHow Akili Built a Video Game to Help Kids with ADHDCan a video game help improve attention skills in kids with ADHD? According to Akili Interactive in Boston, the answer is yes. They’ve created an action game called EndeavorRx that runs on a tablet and uses adaptive AI to help improve focus, attentional control, and multitasking skills in kids aged 8 to 12. And it’s not just Akili saying that: In 2020 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration agrees cleared EndeavorRx as a prescription treatment for ADHD, based on positive data from a randomized, controlled study of more than 600 children with the disorder. It was the first video game ever...
2022-04-2651 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowFauna Bio Awakens Medicine to the Mysteries of HibernationWhy is hibernation something that bears and squirrels do, but humans don’t? Even more interesting, what’s going on inside a hibernating animal, on a physiological and genetic level, that allows them to survive the winter in a near-comatose state without freezing to death and without ingesting any food or water? And what can we learn about that process that might inform human medicine?Those are the big questions being investigated right now by a four-year-old startup in California called Fauna Bio. And Harry's guests today are two of Fauna Bio’s three founding scientists: Ashley Zehnde...
2022-04-1253 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowFinally, a Drug Company Listens to People with Hearing LossIn a day and age when it feels like there are drugs for everything—from restless legs to toenail fungus to stage fright—it's strange the drug industry has almost completely ignored one of our most important organs: our ears. Given that 15 percent of people in the U.S. report at least some level of hearing loss, you’d think drug makers would be doing more to figure out how they can help. Well, now there’s at least one company that is. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Decibel Therapeutics went public in 2021 to help raise money to fund its research on ways to...
2022-03-2957 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowIs Your Kid's Infection Bacterial or Viral? Eran Eden's MeMed Can TellIf you’re a parent, you’ve probably had this experience many times: Your young child has a high fever, and maybe a sore throat, but you don’t know exactly what’s wrong. Is it a bacterial infection, in which case an antibiotic might help? Or is it a viral infection, in which case, you just have to wait it out? The symptoms of bacterial and viral infections are often the same, and most of the time, even a doctor can’t tell the difference. Viral infections are more common, but sometimes, the doctor will prescribe an antibiotic anyway, if...
2022-03-1551 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowNetflix Docu-series Star Jacob Glanville Returns To Talk About How The Pandemic Ends—and His New CompanyIn March of 2020, as SARS-CoV-2 was first sweeping the globe, Jacob Glanville joined Harry on the podcast to talk about the pandemic and how the kinds of antibody therapies being studied by his company Distributed Bio might help. At the end of 2020, Charles River Laboratories bought Distributed Bio on the strength of its computational immunology platform—which automates the discovery of antibody therapeutics. But Charles River let Glanville spin off the research programs he'd been pursuing, which included neutralizing antibodies to treat influenza and coronaviruses. And now those programs have been rolled up into Centivax, a South San Francisco-based bio...
2022-03-0152 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowHow to See Inside Your Body Using Continuous Glucose Monitors with Maz Brumand from LevelsUntil recently, getting a blood glucose measurement required a finger stick. The whole process was so painful and annoying that only diabetics taking insulin bothered to do it regularly. But there’s a new class of devices called continuous glucose monitors, or CGMs, that make getting a glucose reading as easy as glancing at your smartwatch to see your heart rate. A CGM is a patch with a tiny electrode that goes into your skin to measure glucose levels in the interstitial fluid, plus a radio that sends the measurement to an external device like your phone. The devices ar...
2022-02-1553 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowGetting Value out of Electronic Health Records, with Verana HealthHealthcare is one of those areas where more data is almost always better. And I talk a lot on the show about how data is helping doctors and patients make smarter decisions. But a lot of the data we’d still like to have is stuck in those arcane Electronic Health Record systems or EHRs that medical practices or hospital systems use to track their patients. These systems tend to be closed, proprietary, user-unfriendly, and incompatible with one another. And we've repeatedly made the case here on the show that EHR technology is holding back innovation across the healthcare mar...
2022-02-0146 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowWhat Exponential Change Really Means in Healthcare, with Azeem AzharAs we say here on The Harry Glorikian Show, technology is changing everything about healthcare works—and the reason we keep talking about it month after month is that the changes are coming much faster than they ever did in the past. Each leap in innovation enables an even bigger leap just one step down the road. Another way of saying this is that technological change today feels exponential. And there’s nobody who can explain exponential change better than today’s guest, Azeem Azhar.Azeem produces a widely followed newsletter about technology called Exponential View. And last y...
2022-01-1857 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowAt the Cutting Edge of Computational Precision Medicine, with Rafael RosengartenGenialis, led by CEO Rafael Rosengarten, is one of the companies working toward a future where there are no more one-size-fits-all drugs—where, instead, every patient gets matched with the best drug for them based on their disease subtype, as measured by gene-sequence and gene-expression data. Analyzing that data—what Rosengarten calls "computational precision medicine"—is already helping drug developers identify the patients who are most likely to respond to experimental medicines. Not long from now, the same technology could help doctors diagnose patients in the clinic, and/or feed back into drug discovery by providing more biological targets for bio...
2022-01-0443 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowHow To Track The Pandemic Using Mobile Data, With Nuria OliverWhen the coronavirus pandemic swept across the world in early 2020, Spain was one of the countries hardest hit. At the time, Nuria Oliver was a telecommunications engineer working and living in Valencia, one of Spain's 17 autonomous regions. She’d spent years working for companies like Microsoft, Telefonica, and Vodafone, using AI to analyze data from mobile networks to explore big questions about healthcare, economics, crime, and other issues—so she realized right away that mobile data could be an important tool for government leaders and public health officials trying to get a handle on the spread of COVID-19.Wi...
2021-12-2158 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowImpact of Artificial Intelligence on the Doctor-Patient relationshipWe've learned from previous guests that machine learning and other forms of AI are helping to identify better disease treatments, get drugs to market faster, and spot health problems before they get out of hand. But what if they could also help patients find the best doctors for them, and help doctors frame their advice in a way that patients can relate to? This week, Harry's guest, Briana Brownell, talks about the computational tools her company Pure Strategy is building to find patterns in people’s personal preferences that can lower cultural barriers, enable better matchmaking between patients and do...
2021-12-0749 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowSeqster's Ardy Arianpour on How To Smash Health Data SiloesYour medical records don't make pleasant bedtime reading. And not only are they inscrutable—they're often mutually (and deliberately) incompatible, meaning different hospitals and doctor's offices can't share them across institutional boundaries. Harry's guest this week, Ardy Arianpour, is trying to fix all that. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Seqster, a San Diego company that’s spent the last five years working on ways to pull patient data from all the places where it lives, smooth out all the formatting differences, and create a unified picture that patients themselves can understand and use.The way Ardy e...
2021-11-2358 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowWhy AI-based Computational Pathology Detects More CancersChances are you or someone you love has had a biopsy to check for cancer. Doctors got a tissue sample and they sent it into a pathology lab, and at some point you got a result back. If you were lucky, it was negative and there was no cancer. But have you ever wondered exactly what happens in between those steps? Until recently, it’s been a meticulous but imperfect manual process where a pathologist would put a thin slice of tissue under a high-powered microscope and examine the cells by eye, looking for patterns that indicate malignancy. But no...
2021-11-0949 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowNanowear's Venk Varadan on the Next-Gen of Wearable TechnologyMany 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. And that kind of technology could move us one step closer to a world where we're far more intimately...
2021-10-2653 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowA New Era of Participatory Medicine: Talking with E-Patient Dave, Part 2Today 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. If you missed Part 1 of our interview with Dave, we recommend that you check that out before listening to this one. In that part, 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 w...
2021-10-1244 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowE-Patient Dave Says We Still Need Better Access to our Health DataThe 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 k...
2021-09-2850 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowJeff Elton On How To Speed Drug Development Using "Real-World Data"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. Concert AI, which has offices in Boston, Philadelphia, Memphis, New York, and Banga...
2021-08-0347 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowNoosheen Hashemi on January's Personalized Tech for Controlling Blood SugarIn 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.January's smartphone app collects blood glucose levels from disposable devices called continuous glucose monitors (CGMs), as well as heart rate data from patients’ Fitbits or Apple Watches. The app also makes it easier for us...
2021-07-2048 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowIntelligencia's Vangelis Vergetis on Building a Successful Drug PipelineThis 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.Bringing better analytics into the pharma industry has been an uphill battle, Vergetis says. On...
2021-07-0552 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowGeeking Out about Data with Roche’s Angeli MoellerAngeli 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 wo...
2021-05-2457 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowHow Tag.bio Makes It Easier to Interrogate Your DataThe 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.Tag.bio aims to make it possible for any worker in the life sciences sector—even if they don't have a PhD in...
2021-05-1046 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowRana el Kaliouby: When Will Machines Understand Human EmotionsComputers 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 CEO of a Boston-based company called Affectiva that’s working to close that gap.El Kaliouby and her former MIT colleague Rosalind Picard are the inventors of the field of emotion AI, also called affective computing. The main product at Affectiva, which Picard and El Kaliouby co-founded in 2009, is a media...
2021-04-1233 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowJason Gammack on the Promise of Spatial BiologyRapid 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.Gammack says the technology offers a high-resolution way to see the geography of gene transcription in single cells, that is, where specific messenger RNA molecules congregate once they’ve left the nucleus. The technology can tr...
2021-03-2954 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowAuransa's Pek Lum on Using Machine Learning to Match New Drugs with the Right PatientsPek 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 patients 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.The Palo Alto, CA-based drug discovery startup, formerly known as Capella Biosciences, has a pipeline of novel compounds for treating cancer and other conditions identified through machine learning analysis of genomic data and other kinds of data. It’s closest to the clinical trial stage with a ge...
2021-03-1548 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowEight Sleep Matteo Franceschetti Says it's time for a Smarter Mattress to improve your healthThis 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.The Pod is designed to counteract body heat and provide a surface that stays cool all night, on the theory that people sleep better when it’s cool or cold. It includes four layers of foam topped by an “Active Tech Grid Cover” that includes sensors to detect body temperature, breathing patterns, heartbeat, and tossing and turning, as wel...
2021-03-0133 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowWhat's more important? Lifespan or Health Span? - Michael GeerMichael 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 health span," or years of healthy functioning. The Humanity iPhone app, which is currently being beta-tested by users in the UK, is designed to track various types of health-related data for free, such as exercise levels. At various premium subscription levels users will be able to track biomarkers in their blo...
2021-02-1549 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowIntelinAir's AI-Driven Image Analysis is Saving Crops - Down on the Farm today but tomorrow.....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.Harry has talked with scores of guests about advanced computer science techniques like n...
2021-02-0155 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowTempus's Joel Dudley on Building a New Infrastructure for Precision MedicineWhat 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.When Harry last spoke with Dudley in January 2019, he was a tenured professor of genetics and genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center and director of the Institute for Next Generation He...
2021-01-1852 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowChristine Lemke on Evidation's Push to Use Wearables in HealthcareThis 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. Lemke is Evidation's co-CEO.Our Fitbits and Apple Watches are with us so much of the time that the data they collect can go way beyond telling us whether we’ve completed our 10,000 steps for the day. They can also help doctors diagnose cardiovascular problems, and even provide early signs of cognitive changes like the onset of dementia. But the da...
2021-01-0438 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowHow Drug Development Guru Mark Eller Went from AI Skeptic to AI SupporterHow does an expert in pharmacokinetics, whose only exposure to computers was taking one semester of programming in college to meet a language requirement, become an advocate for the new AI-driven style of drug discovery? This week Harry finds out from Mark Eller, who helped to invent Allegra at Hoechst Marion Roussel (now Sanofi), spent 12 years at Jazz Pharmaceuticals, and is now senior vice president of research and development at twoXAR, an AI-driven drug discovery startup.In our previous episode from August 31, 2020, Harry spoke with twoXAR founder and CEO Andrew A. Radin, who confessed to being a...
2020-09-1441 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowAndrew A. Radin Returns with a Progress Report on twoXARHarry welcomes back Andrew A. Radin, CEO of the drug discovery startup twoXAR, where scientists model pathogenesis computationally to identify potential drug molecules, ideally shaving years off the drug development process.Harry first spoke with Radin two years ago at the AI Applications Summit—Biopharma. (Listen back to MoneyBall Medicine Episode 9 from November 2018 for more details about the company's innovations.) Since then, the company has begun to use what Radin calls twoXAR's "discovery engine" to test hypotheses about new drug leads in 18 different treatment areas, counting a dozen internal programs."We go after complex disease wh...
2020-08-3156 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowRayid Ghani Explains How AI Can Both Predict and Shape Patient BehaviorIn 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.Ghani tell Harry he grew up hating coding, since the very need for it showed that "computers are really stupid and dumb." But Ghani says he eventually realized that machine learning can change that by allowing programmers to teach computers the rules of the game, at which point they can improve on their own and learn to solve...
2020-08-2044 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowOura's Harpreet Rai on a Ring That May Change Covid-19 DetectionThis week Harry speaks with Oura Health 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.The ring is equipped with sensors that measure heart rate and body temperature, as well as a tiny Bluetooth radio that syncs the data it collects with a smartphone app. The Finland-based company designed the ring primarily to measure sleep quality, but it also contains an accelerometer and a gyroscope that can measure daytime movement and activity. Together, the data is us...
2020-08-0346 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowElli Papaemmanuil Explains How Genomics Will Transform Cancer CareThis 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.Papaemmanuil is an assistant professor of computational oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Her lab's research is built around the idea that the genetic sequences of tumor cells reveal distinctive acquired mutations that can allow doctors to predict the course of the disease in specific patients and help them to design individualized treatments. That idea isn't new—bu...
2020-06-2951 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowGregory Bowman Explains How You Can Help Cure the Coronavirus from HomeThis 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 current 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.Understanding and modeling the 3D structures of tiny, ever-shifting protein molecules is a notoriously complex problem. Folding@home cuts through it by sending crystallography data and other information to thousands of home computers and using...
2020-06-1732 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowCovid-19 Tracing Inside Companies, with SaferMe's Clint Van MarrewijkHarry'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.In epidemiology, contact tracing is the art of determining who has crossed paths with an infected individual, so that those exposed can be alerted and can take appropriate action, such as self-isolating. Health agencies around the world are building public smartphone apps to assist...
2020-06-0129 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowUlo Palm on P-Values: What They Are and Why They're Past Their PrimeThough the p-value "determines everything we do in drug development or medical research," says Dr. Ulo Palm , it may be one of the most misunderstood and misused quantities in experimental science—drug discovery included. At its core, the p-value shows the probability that an observed effect was due to random chance. In other words, if a drug seems to outperforms a placebo with an associated p-value of 0.05, there's only a 5 percent chance that the study was wrong and that the drug is, in fact, no better than the placebo. A p-value of 0.05 is the accepted threshold for validity in mos...
2020-05-2042 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowHow Data Is Critical to Engineering Antibodies to Block COVID-19Building on his March 2020 interview with Jake Glanville, the founding partner and CEO of South San Francisco-based computational antibody engineering startup Distributed Bio, Harry speaks with three company scientists in the trenches: JP Buerckert, director of computational immunology, and Shahrad Daraekia and Jack Wang, both senior scientists. Together they're working on projects such as engineering existing human antibodies to the SARS virus so that they'll also work against the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV2.The company's special sauce lies in its computational algorithms for analyzing antibody gene sequences and generating billions of new candidate antibodies against different pathogens. "We...
2020-04-1634 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowDaniella Gilboa on How Deep Learning Can Revolutionize IVFDoctors helping couples conceive through in-vitro fertilization typically must screen multiple fertilized embryos to select one embryo for implantation—but the process is fraught with risk and subjectivity. from In 2018 Gilboa and her colleagues Daniel Seidman and Eyal Schiff co-founded AIVF, an Israel-based startup developing decision support tools that use deep learning and computer vision to lower the risk by identifying the most promising embryos for intrauterine implantation.The company's technology takes the place of old-fashioned visual evaluation of embryos by humans, instead of capturing time-lapse video of embryos from the moment of conception to the fifth da...
2020-01-2730 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowPeter Coffee and Salesforce's Vision for the Platformization of HealthcareHarry talks this week with Salesforce's vice president of strategic research, Peter Coffee. The computer-industry veteran and former tech columist says that in the era of 1) outcomes-based payments for medical care, 2) an aging patient base, and 3) ubiquitous sensors and continuous data collection, there's a huge opportunity—and financial incentive—for healthcare providers to employ technology platforms that improve the client experience.Might Salesforce end up marketing such a platform? Coffee says it's logical for the company, best known for its cloud-based customer relationship management software, to think about offering hospitals or medical service providers a configurable, CRM-style syst...
2019-05-1744 minThe Harry Glorikian ShowKathryn Teng on Unlocking the Puzzle of Population HealthKathryn Teng, MD, is division chief of internal medicine and community medicine at MetroHealth, one of three major healthcare systems serving Cleveland and the rest of Cuyahoga County in Ohio. She believes that healthcare costs are out of control in part because too many patients go directly to specialists about issues that their primary care physician or nurses could and should handle. But figuring out how many primary care doctors a big healthcare system like MetroHealth needs, and where they should be placed, is a data, analytics, and management problem.When she arrived at MetroHealth in 2015, Teng...
2019-04-1239 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowMark Boguski on Antidotes to Overspecialization in MedicineAdjusting to a more collaborative style may take doctors some time, says Dr. Mark Boguski, but if they stop confining themselves to disciplinary boundaries, they'll be able to see connections between different areas of medicine that aren't taught in medical schools. Boguski draws on examples from oncology, where he says doctors are gradually being retrained to think in terms of disease pathways instead of discreet organ systems.Dr. Boguski is the chief medical officer of Liberty Biosecurity and founder of the Precision Medicine Network. He's a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine and a...
2019-03-0137 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowAalpen Patel and Using AI to Reduce Time-to-Diagnosis (AI World Special Series Part 1)What if we could use machine learning to train software to read CT scans of patients with intracranial hemorrhaging? Time to diagnosis could be doubled, potentially saving lives. This week Harry discusses such questions with Dr. Aalpen Patel, a physician-engineer who chairs Geisinger's department of radiology and directs is 3D imaging and printing laboratory.This episode is the first in a two-part series on getting AI, machine learning, and analytics working in the healthcare provider setting, recorded as part of the AI World conference produced by Cambridge Innovation Institute in Boston in December 2018.You can...
2019-02-1534 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowMassimo Buscema on AI and What We Can and Can't See in the Human BodyHarry's guest in this episode is Massimo Buscema, director of the Semieon Research Center in Rome, Italy, and a full professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. Buscema researches and consults internationally on the theory and applications of AI, artificial neural networks, and evolutionary algorithms. The conversation focuses on AI and its applications in healthcare, and how it can enhance what we can see and uncover what we cannot.You can read a full transcript of this episode and browse all of our other episodes at glorikian.com/podcast/.Please rate and review The...
2019-02-0137 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowBarrett Rollins and the DNA-driven Transformation of OncologyHarry's guest for this episode is Dr. Barrett Rollins, the chief scientific officer and faculty dean for academic affairs at Boston's Dana Farber Cancer Institute and the Linde Family Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Harry and Dr. Rollins dig into how large-scale DNA analysis can one day put much more usable information into the hands of oncologists, and how that data affects individual patients, the practice of medicine, and new therapies under development.Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod t...
2019-01-1830 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowLeah Binder on How Price and Quality Transparency Helps Patients and EmployersLeapfrog Group president and CEO Leah Binder talks with Harry about data transparency and how it helps inform healthcare decisions by putting the right information in the hands of patients and employers.Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:1. Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.2. Navigate to The Harry Glorikian Show podcast. You can find it by searching for it or selecting it from your library. Just note that you'll have to go to...
2018-11-0939 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowJohn Glaser and How AI is Affecting Electronic Medical Records SystemsHarry's guest John Glaser, senior vice president of Population Health at Cerner, speculates on how business models in healthcare are changing and how artificial intelligence and EMR systems will work together in the future.Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:1. Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.2. Navigate to The Harry Glorikian Show podcast. You can find it by searching for it or selecting it from your library. Just note that you'll have to...
2018-10-2634 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowDekel Gelbman and How Machine Learning Is Changing Rare Disease DiagnosisHarry's guest is Dekel Gelbman, founding CEO of FDNA. The company uses a combination of computer vision, deep learning, and other artificial intelligence techniques to improve and accelerate diagnostics and therapeutics for children with rare diseases.Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:1. Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.2. Navigate to The Harry Glorikian Show podcast. You can find it by searching for it or selecting it from your library. Just note that you...
2018-10-1238 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowJason Bhan and How AI and Machine Learning Are Enabling Early Disease DetectionJason Bhan, co-founder and chief medical officer of Prognos, joins Harry to talk about how machine learning is being used to dig into multi-sourced clinical diagnostic data to improve health by predicting disease early.Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:1. Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.2. Navigate to The Harry Glorikian Show podcast. You can find it by searching for it or selecting it from your library. Just note that you'll have to...
2018-10-0231 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowNiven Narain and How AI and Machine Learning Are Changing Drug DiscoveryHarry interviews Niven Narain, the co-founder, president and CEO of Berg, a Boston-based biopharma company driving the next generation of drugs and diagnostics by combining patient-driven biology and AI to unravel actionable disease insight. Narain has overseen development of Berg’s clinical stage assets and pipeline and forged strategic partnerships with industry academic and US and UK governments. He says Berg's philosophy is to combine a systems biology architecture with patients' demographic data and clinical outcome data, and then apply Bayesian artificial intelligence algorithms to drive better understanding of diseases.To learn more visit glorikian.com/podcast/...
2018-09-1539 min
The Harry Glorikian ShowGlenn Steele and How Analytics are Changing HealthcareHost Harry Glorikian talks with Dr. Glenn Steele, chairman of G. Steele Health Solutions, which helps healthcare organizations improve quality, and vice chairman of the Health Transformation Alliance, a cooperative of self-insured employers. Dr. Steele is the former chairman of XG Health Solutions and former president and CEO of Geisinger Health Systems, and he shares his views on how data and analytics are changing every aspect of healthcare.To learn more visit glorikian.com/podcast/Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, o...
2018-09-1139 min