August 31, 2021
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 detect and cut other DNA sequences, CRISPR has spread to labs across the world in the nine years since Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier published a groundbreaking 2012 Science paper describing how the process works.
67 min 12 sec
8.3.20
This week Harry speaks with Oura 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.
46 min 42 sec
7.20.20
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 century.”
49 min 27 sec
6.29.20
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.
52 min 21 sec
6.17.20
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 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.
33 min 18 sec
6.5.20
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.
30 min 15 sec
5.22.20
This week Harry quizzes Ulo Palm, the senior vice president of digital sciences at Allergan, about the long and problematic reign of the p-value in statistical analysis, and why it may be time for the biopharma industry to look to more nuanced measures of whether a drug trial succeeded.
43 min 03 sec
4.16.20
Distributed Bio aims to use its computational antibody engineering platform to identify antibodies that protect against SARS and optimize them to block the SARS-CoV2 coronavirus. This week Harry gets an progress update from three key Distributed Bio scientists.
35 min 03 sec
3.10.20
Harry’s guest for this unusually frank and urgent episode is Jacob Glanville, the founding partner, CEO, and president of Distributed Bio. The company is using its skills in computational antibody analysis and optimization to help the drug industry develop new vaccines and antibody-based treatments for a range of diseases, potentially including the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
54 min 39 sec
3.3.20
Harry interviews Ramy Farid, president and CEO of Schrödinger Pharmaceuticals, about the company’s success using chemical simulation software to help drug makers zero in on promising drug candidates—and about its recent IPO, which brought in more than twice as much cash as the company expected.
28 min 50 sec
2.5.20
As the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak spreads in Asia, Harry speaks with Phil Febbo, the chief medical officer of Illumina, one of the world’s largest makers of equipment for high-throughput DNA sequencing. Febbo highlights sequencing’s emerging contribution to the understanding and treatment of infectious disease.
28 min 36 sec
1.29.20
Daniella Gilboa is an embryologist in Israel working to bring the power of AI and machine learning to the embryo selection phase of IVF treatment. She explains how her new startup aims to automate this error-ridden process, raising efficiency and lowering the overall cost of IVF.
30 min 55 sec
1.3.20
Harry’s guest this week is Tom Davenport, who argues that the healthcare industry is way behind in its use of big-data analytics software to make smarter decisions about business and patient care. “This is a period of lots of opportunity to use new technologies to change healthcare, and God knows we need it, from a value-for-expense standpoint,” Davenport tells Harry. “But we’re not really at the point, at least on the clinical side yet, where we see a lot of direct applications. We’re still in the age of compiling transaction data. We haven’t used it much yet to make decisions and take actions.”
31 min 53 sec
12.16.19
Harry welcomes Milind Kamkolkar back to the program. The former Sanofi exec is now the chief data and digital officer at Cellarity, a Flagship Pioneering-backed therapeutics startup working to model cell behavior computationally in order to identify new drug targets and therapies.
38 min 21 sec
11.26.19
This week Harry welcomes a guest who could be considered a "poster child" for the movement to incorporate more data into clinical practice: Dr. Alan Copperman, a New York-based specialist in reproductive medicine. He says the data generated by genetic screening of fertilized embryos is rapidly and dramatically improving outcomes for couples who want children.
27 min 14 sec
11.5.19
This week Harry talks with Gini Deshpande, the co-founder and CEO of San Mateo, CA-based NuMedii, a company making judicious use of big data and AI to speed up drug discovery.
28 min 33 sec
10.25.19
This week Harry talks with Chris Boone, a leader of Pfizer's effort to use new types of real-world data on patients—from insurance claims to lab tests to molecular profiles to data from wearable health sensor—to speed up drug discovery, development, and testing.
37 min 21 sec
8.9.19
Harry talks with the CEO and president of Beth Israel Lahey Health, the product of Lahey Health's merger this spring with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center 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 needs to evolve beyond the fee-for-service era.
35 min 39 sec
5.17.19
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 platforms that improve the client experience.
45 min 25 sec
4.26.19
Harry speaks with Boston University’s Rhoda Au, who believes that algorithms parsing new kinds of digital data about individual patients could find warning signs of diseases like dementia while they’re still preventable—leading to a new era in which precision medicine is gradually replaced by “precision health.”
40 min 03 sec
4.12.19
Harry has a heart-to-heart conversation with Dr. Kathryn Teng, who’s working to use data to implement an access- and experience-based population health model at MetroHealth, the public health system for Cuyahoga County, Ohio.
39 min 59 sec
