The Harry Glorikian Show

This 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 t...

Harry'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...

Though 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-va...

Building 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 enginee...

If you've seen the recent Netflix docu-series "Pandemic," about efforts to check previous viral outbreaks, you've seen former Pfizer scientist Jacob Glanville in action. The inventor, entrepreneur, and Ph. D. immunologist capitalized on the advent of cloud computing to provide vaccine and drug developers with high-throughput genomic sequencing of antibodies in humans and other species. He calls it...

Schrödinger makes software that models the physics of atomic-scale interactions to predict the chemical properties of candidate drug molecules, helping its customers speed up drug discovery. A decade ago, Farid tells Harry, the company faced the chicken-and-egg challenge of convincing customers that its computational platform works, so that they would scale up their commitment, so that they could...

Rapid sequencing of viral genomes is giving physicians and epidemiologists new ways to identify, track, and potentially slow outbreaks of viral infections such as the novel Wuhan coronavirus. That means high-throughput genome sequencing—which had predominantly been a research tool—is taking its place as a front-line weapon in the fight to prevent pandemics, says Febbo, a medical oncologist. "Last...

Doctors 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 l...

Tom Davenport knows analytics, big data, and AI—he teaches executive courses on the subject at Babson College, Harvard Business School, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the MIT Sloan School of Management, and is widely known for his books on analytics and AI in business, Competing on Analytics (2007), Only Humans Need Apply (2016), and The AI Advantage (2018). Davenport notes that a number...

Milind Kamkolkar joined Cellarity in January 2019 to help the company to prove that it is now possible to "encode a cell" digitally—to use big data, deep learning, and other methods to model many different interconnected networks of molecular interactions.  "The whole idea...is really only feasible now," he says. "What changed over the last number of years is the ability to compute at scale." The...

Dr. Alan Copperman is director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility and Vice Chairman of the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Science at the Mount Sinai Health System. He's also a clinical professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; medical director of Reproductive Medicine Associates o...

Gini Desphande says she likes to think of "AI" as augmented intelligence rather than artificial intelligence: a system of human plus machine intelligence that can speed up drug development and cut R&D costs and failure rates in clinical trials. AI "really isn't at the point where it's automatable," she says. "We still need a lot of human intelligence to be coupled with this technology, to determin...

Dr. Chris Boone, vice president and lead for global medical epidemiology and big data analysis at Pfizer, is a health futurist, social entrepreneurs, executive, professor, patient advocate, and self-proclaimed "data hippie." He says he long aimed to be CEO of a health system, but eventually embraced his "true self" as a student of informatics, business intelligence, and big data analytics.  "I com...

Harry talks with Kevin Tabb, MD, the CEO and president of Beth Israel Lahey Health, the product of Lahey Health's merger this spring with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and several other hospitals in the Boston region. How does Dr. Tabb manage change inside a growing organization that—by his own admission—has to build and implement new tools, processes and the actionable data it need...

Harry 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 pla...

As one of the researchers involved in the 70-year-long Framingham Heart Study, Rhoda Au is in a unique position to investigate whether changes in speech patterns in middle-aged people could prefigure the onset of Alzheimer’s disease later in life, and whether early detection might give patients more time to take preventative measures. She’s been part of the Framingham study since 1990, and she’s a...

Kathryn 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 figuri...

Many of the processes carried out in traditional chemistry labs searching for new drugs or drug targets can be sped up through factory-style automation—and in fact, “combinatorial chemistry” was a big boost for the field. But Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a theoretical chemist in the departments of chemistry and computer science at the University of Toronto, says “the transition to autonomy is what we really...

Dr. Jennifer Carter says it was watching friends and family members stricken with cancer struggle navigate the complexities of the healthcare system in the early 2000s that inspired her to start a company in the area of precision medicine. At that time, the development of targeted therapies for cancers with specific genetic markers was already offering new hope to patients, but it was also creatin...

Adjusting 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 in...

Harry's guest Sandy Aronson argues that AI and apps are not the solution for better healthcare; more effective care workflows enabled by AI and apps are the solution. Aronson is the executive director of information technology at Partners HealthCare Personalized Medicine. His team develops the IT infrastructure needed to support genetic-based personalized medicine in both patient-based and laborat...

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-par...

Harry'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...

Harry'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 indiv...

Harry's guest this week is Dr. Joel Dudley from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he serves as executive vice president of precision health, associate professor of genetics and genomic sciences, and founding director of the Institute for Next Generation Healthcare. Dr. Dudley explains how his group is utilizing data to uncover health problems that can't be detected through normal...