From Models to Medicine

Anna Benefiel has spent over 20 years in healthcare innovation, and she's tired of watching life sciences sit on the sidelines of quantum computing. In this episode, she makes a direct case for why pharma needs to stop treating quantum as a future problem and start treating it as a present opportunity. We get into what quantum actually does that classical computing cannot, why probabilistic nu...

In this episode of From Models to Medicine, we speak with Vid Stojevic , the co-founder and CEO of Kuano, a Cambridge-based company using quantum algorithms and AI to tackle the drug discovery problems that traditional computational chemistry keeps failing. In this episode, he explains why he deliberately ignored the broad platform play and went narrow instead, targeting the specific early-stage p...

Jenny Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Outpost Bio, where her team is working to make human microbiology computable. In this episode, she breaks down why bias in ML models is so easy to miss. High overall accuracy can hide terrible performance on specific subgroups, and in healthcare, that gap has consequences. She traces the problem upstream, from skewed training datasets to the way clinical def...

Bogdan Knezevic is the CEO and co-founder of Kaleidoscope Bio, and he's seen enough failed AI implementations to know where they almost always break down. In this episode, he walks us through what minimum viable data standardization actually looks like in practice, why consistent naming conventions and structured data entry matter more than people want to admit, and what every biotech CEO should a...

In this episode of From Models to Medicine, we sit down with Minna Schmidt , a postdoctoral researcher at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Minna walks us through Braak's hypothesis and the emerging "brain-first vs. body-first" framing of the disease, explaining how symptoms can appear up to 30 years before a clinical diagnosis is ever made. We also get into the data side of...

In this episode of From Models to Medicine, we sit down with Sal Tejani , Associate Director for Field Medical Affairs at Regeneron*, who started his career catching dangerous prescription errors at CVS and never lost the instinct for finding the lever that actually moves things. Today that instinct is pointed squarely at AI; how to use it, when to trust it, and when it will absolutely get you int...

Rachel Jacobson has spent her career moving between some of the most demanding corners of life sciences before founding Powerhouse Biology. In this episode, she traces that journey and explains why, after all of it, she keeps coming back to mitochondria. We get into what it actually takes to bridge biology and machine learning inside a lab culture, why asking "stupid questions" across di...

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Freddy Nguyen , CEO and co-founder of Nine Diagnostics, whose background spans medicine, pathology, optics, and nanotechnology. Freddy shares how Nine Diagnostics is building a multiomics platform that helps cancer patients find out within days whether their treatment is actually working. We dig into why AI's real power in medicine lies in its ability to c...

In this episode of From Models to Medicine , we sit down with Elisa Martin Perez , a postdoc at University of California, Berkeley, to talk about how non-coders are starting to use AI in their day-to-day work. From learning R through conversation to making sense of massive CRISPR screens, Elisa shares how AI is becoming a practical tool for navigating data, checking experimental design, and cuttin...

What does it actually take to make AI work inside a pharmaceutical company and why do so many efforts stall after the model is built? Pranay Mohanty , from J&J Innovative Medicine, joins us to talk about how building the model is only one part of the work and what can happen when you try to apply that model to messy, real-world data. We dig into how teams are starting to use digital twins to s...

In this episode of From Models to Medicine , we sit down with Ashley Zehnder, the founder of Fauna Bio to explore one of the most creative bets in drug discovery: using extreme animal biology to unlock human therapeutics. We dig into the graph neural networks powering Fauna Bio's drug discovery platform, the unglamorous data curation work that makes it all function, and why human-in-the-loop i...

What does emergency medicine have to do with large-scale knowledge systems? Jason Grafft joins us to talk about his non-linear path from EMS and simulation education to knowledge engineering and why the structured, fact-bound thinking that medicine demands is one of the most undervalued assets in the AI era. We dig into how he uses graph-based models to bridge clinical experts and technical system...

In this episode of From Models to Medicine, we sit down with Rachel Thomas to discuss the growing gap between AI hype and scientific reality in the life sciences. The conversation highlights the hidden costs of poor data quality and the necessity of domain expertise, featuring deep dives into real-world AI missteps, from a flawed enzyme classification paper to an app's mishandling of long-COVI...

As pathology labs digitize, how do skilled practitioners learn to trust AI with patient diagnoses? Michael Rivers discusses the critical importance of "explainable AI," keeping the human pathologist in the loop with the ability to override algorithms, and how these powerful new technologies will help address the global shortage of pathologists, ultimately bringing equitable, expert care to patient...

Join us in our first episode where we chat with Margo Georgiadis, CEO of Montai Therapeutics as we discuss what a model means in ML vs. life sciences and how she's been able to bridge the knowledge gap between these two practices for her team.

Welcome to From Model to Medicine , a podcast from KAMI Think Tank exploring how artificial intelligence is actually being applied across the life sciences industry. Each episode, we speak with scientists, operators, and leaders working at the intersection of AI and biology, from drug discovery and clinical development to regulatory operations and beyond. KAMI Think Tank is an educational organiza...