The Harry Glorikian Show

In 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 g...

This 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 who...

From her TED talks and her appearances on PBS, geneticist Wendy Chung is known to millions of people as an expert on autism. But thanks to funding from the Simons Foundation, she’s also known to tens of thousands of people with autism and their families as the leader of history’s largest study of the genetics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It’s called SPARK, for Simons Foundation Powering Auti...

Having helped to bring big data to genomics through the lab techniques he invented, such as RNA-Seq, the Stanford molecular biologist Michael Snyder is focused today on how to use data from devices to increase the human healthspan. Some cars have as many as 400 sensors, Snyder notes. "And you can't imagine driving your car around without a dashboard...Yet here we are as people, which are more impo...

Angeli 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...

The 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...

This week Harry speaks with Richard Fox, a computational biologist whose work at two life sciences startups, Inscripta and Infinome, is helping to automate and vastly scale up the process of engineering an organism's genome to evoke new functions or uncover important genetic pathways. With the discovery of the genetic scissors known as CRISPR-Cas9 in 2012, biologists gained the ability to make pre...

Computers 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 for...

Rapid 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 technolog...

Pek 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...

This 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 i...

Michael 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-...

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 iden...

What if there were a single company that could connect hospital electronic health record systems to a massive genomic testing and analytics platform? It would be a little like Amazon Web Services (AWS) for healthcare—an enabling platform for anyone who wants to deploy precision medicine at scale. That's exactly what Joel Dudley says he's now helping to build at Tempus. When Harry last spoke with D...

This week Harry catches up with Christine Lemke from Evidation Health, a startup in San Mateo, CA, that helps drug developers and other organizations analyze the effectiveness of smart devices and wearables in new types of therapies. 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 compl...

Thomas Chittenden, chief data science officer at Genuity Science, says what's keeping the genomics revolution from turning into an equivalent revolution in drug discovery is that most of our domain knowledge about the molecular biology of disease has come from a hunt-and-peck approach, focused on one gene at a time. Find some gene relevant to a disease, knock it out, and you see what happens. Such...

This week Harry interviews the head of Etiometry, a Boston-based startup building visualization systems and decision support software for hospital intensive care units. Shane Cooke says critical care "is an incredibly complex environment where speed matters and information matters." By aggregating real-time data, lab results, and historical patient records on a single screen, Cooke says, Etiometry...

Charles Fisher is the founder and CEO at Unlearn, a San Francisco company using purpose-built machine learning algorithms that use historical clinical trial data to create "digital twins" of actual participants in controlled drug trials to help predict how each participant would have fared if they'd been given a placebo. By comparing a patient's actual record to their digital twin, Fisher says, th...

What if all our everyday assumptions about economics are wrong? This week Harry speaks with author and entrepreneur Jeff Booth, who says the most powerful force for change in the future will be deflation: getting more for less. Even the healthcare industry will feel the effects, he says. Listen to find out how. Booth is the author of The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant F...

How 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 pres...

Harry 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...

In this week's show Harry interviews Rayid Ghani, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who studies how to use AI and data science to model and influence people's behavior in realms like politics, healthcare, education, and criminal justice. 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 event...

This 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. T...

David Sable got his start in reproductive medicine in the late 1980s, a time when he says fertility treatments were "very primitive." But by the mid-2000s, he says, new procedures and new insights into the genetics of development had changed everything. His subsequent time observing (and investing in) the field has convinced him that reproductive medicine is "the most interesting area of medicine...

This 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 t...