The Harry Glorikian Show

Most 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 resea...

When 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 d...

Harry'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 stud...

Harry'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 accou...

This 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-synthes...

Can 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...

Why 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 th...

In 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...

If 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,...

In 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...

Until 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 elect...

Healthcare 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, proprieta...

As 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...

Genialis, 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 dev...

When 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...

We'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 Brownel...

Your 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 fiv...

Chances 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 pathologis...

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...

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.  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 tur...

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...

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 cur...

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 dete...

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...

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,...