How we can leverage AI to accelerate progress in health
We need more technologists merging with “doctorpreneurs” and healthcare leaders to unlock the potential of the tools and technologies already available.
[My presentation talking points from my June 12, 2024 talk at the REINVENT FUTURES Great Progression Series in San Fransisco.]
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TITLED: DREAM IMPOSSIBLE!
I’m grateful to share a few thoughts on How we can leverage AI to accelerate progress in health.
In 2011, I co-founded StartUp Health with a multi-decade plan dedicated to achieving a series of health moonshots, like curing Alzheimer’s and diabetes.
We were inspired by NASA and the original moonshot, which leveraged a collaborative innovation model. The combined ideas and technology from more than 20,000 companies and 400,000 people made the moon landing possible.
So after investing in more than 500 health startups and halfway into our 25 year plan to achieve health moonshots, here’s why I believe this new wave of AI is so exciting:
At the same time we’re experiencing exponential leaps with AI, we’re benefiting from a multi-layered wave of innovation across a spectrum of categories converging to advance human health.
Wearable tech, affordable sensors, home diagnostics, neurotech, brain-computer interfaces, robotics, nanotech, genomics, personalized medicine, AI-powered drug discovery…we are in the midst of a new era for health innovation. Quantum leaps like AlphaFold, CRISPR, and new drugs like GLP-1s are just the beginning.
A new spectrum of health innovation is emerging, and today’s powerful AI are just starting to supercharge them all.
But as we learned from NASA, it’s not just about tools and technology.
Progress happened for three reasons:
The challenge was sufficiently hard to attract the world’s best and brightest.
The mission was inspiring and captivated the world’s imagination.
Success depended not just on technology but on collaboration.
To most effectively leverage AI for health progress, we need to focus more on these three fundamental things:
First: Today’s investors and entrepreneurs have a choice. How big of a challenge do you want to tackle?
Much of the health innovation today leveraging AI is down the “administrative path” – logistics, billing and paperwork stuff. Yes, it’s important for the business of healthcare, and there’s lots of money to be made there.
Then there is the hard stuff: the “clinical path like care delivery” and the “discovery path where prevention and cures will emerge”. Yes, it's hard and takes more time. Just ask the pharma execs in the room. This is where safety comes first and the regulatory process really matters.
Second: We need more imagination from businesses and investors. Let’s rise to the ability of the AI tools at our fingertips and do what we do best: create. Too many brilliant minds are still solving the supposed challenge of getting people to click on stuff and buy things faster. We need more big thinking and more innovators and investors to stop optimizing and to start dreaming.
How do we cure Alzheimer’s faster? How do we cure diabetes faster? How do we deliver care to billions more people? The bold ones can find a way with AI in their pocket.
Third: We need more collaboration and cross-pollination of innovation.
Many of the most brilliant minds in AI are within a few miles of here. We need more technologists merging with “doctorpreneurs” and healthcare leaders to unlock the potential of the tools and technologies already available. We need designers, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, and patients working on these challenges together.
Imagine the progress we can make when more of us decide to unlock our creativity to better leverage AI for health. Imagine if we cross-pollinate today’s most amazing tools and supercharge them with AI. Imagine the step change forward for humanity when we all start collaborating on the hardest challenges…
This is how we go from “a thousand songs in your pocket” to safely delivering billions of people “a million doctors in your pocket”.
Unity Stoakes
June 12, 2024 Shack15
This really resonated, Unity — especially the distinction between the administrative and discovery paths. Too much AI investment is chasing the administrative lane when the discovery path is where the real breakthroughs live.
I'm a small example of what you're describing. I'm a Cloud Ops Architect by trade, but my daughter's autism diagnosis pulled me into genomics. I saw how genetically heterogeneous conditions like autism have hundreds of implicated genes but no clear molecular subtypes — and realized it was a data engineering problem I could help with.
So on nights and weekends, I built an open-source pathway subtyping framework (on PyPI and GitHub) that uses ML clustering to identify molecular subtypes in complex diseases. Researchers from INRS to Stanford have started exploring it.
Your point about needing "more technologists merging with healthcare leaders" is exactly right — and the barrier to entry is lower than people think. The talent is out there. We just need more missions worth redirecting it toward.