September 12, 2023
If you’re looking for help thinking about the implications of exponential change in all areas of technology, one of the best people you can turn to is Azeem Azhar. He's a writer, entrepreneur, and investor who publishes the incredibly popular and influential Substack newsletter Exponential View, which takes deep dives into AI and other subjects with world experts. In 2021 Azeem published a whole book along the same lines called The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics, and Society, and he joined Harry on the show in early 2022 to talk about that. This summer, the book came out in paperback—and just this month, Azeem worked with Bloomberg Originals to launch a limited-run TV show and podcast called Exponentially with Azeem Azhar. So it seemed like a great time to revisit Harry's 2022 interview, which resonates with current events even more now than it did when we first aired it.
56 min 35 sec
4.26.21
Richard Fox: Scaling Genome Editing To Drive The Industrial Bio-Economy
52 min 57 sec
4.12.21
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 co-founder and CEO of a Boston-based company called Affectiva that’s working to close that gap.
33 min 06 sec
3.29.21
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.
54 min 59 sec
3.15.21
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 the patients most 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.
48 min 33 sec
3.1.21
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.
34 min 05 sec
2.15.21
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 healthspan,” that is, their predicted years of healthy functioning. This week Harry grills Geer on the app’s features, the startup’s business model, and the argument for better integration of clinical and digital data into consumers’ everyday health decisions.
49 min 39 sec
2.1.21
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 identify problems like weeds or pests that can go undetected from the ground. The parallels to the digital transformation in healthcare aren't hard to spot.
55 min 50 sec
1.18.21
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.
52 min 32 sec
1.4.21
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.
39 min 17 sec
11.23.20
This week Thomas Chittenden of Genuity Science tells Harry about the company's work to use the power of causal statistical learning, Bayesian belief networks, and other advanced math techniques to understand that cascading gene interactions that account for health and disease—and translate them into insights that can provide drug makers with new targets.
54 min 38 sec
8.31.20
Harry welcomes back Andrew A. Radin, CEO of the drug discovery startup twoXAR, where scientists model pathogenesis computationally to identify potential drug molecules and, ideally shaving years off the drug development process.
57 min 29 sec
8.20.20
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.
44 min 48 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
