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20
Aug
2025

Seeking Pockets of Reducibility in Personalized Medicine: Lessons from Google’s AI Health Coach Study

Technologists often imagine a future of health in which AI delivers highly personalized, preemptive guidance, powered by dense, dynamic streams of data. Continuous sensors track physiology and metabolism; lab panels and -omics assays capture molecular signatures; imaging contributes structural and functional context; and genome sequencing rounds out the picture. Collected longitudinally and at population scale, these data are linked to...
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5
Aug
2025

VIDEO: Phil Sharp and Bill Haney on ‘Cracking the Code’

Science and society have always had an uneasy relationship. Yet there are always people out there seeking to build bridges of understanding.  I recently moderated a conversation at MIT with Phil Sharp, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist, and Bill Haney, a filmmaker and biotech entrepreneur with Dragonfly Therapeutics and Skyhawk Therapeutics. They collaborated on a documentary film called “Cracking the Code.”...
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5
Jul
2025

Personal Health Platforms Are Evolving. Now, Their Ambition Must Deepen.

I spoke recently at one of my favorite local conferences, an inspirational gathering that brings together remarkable health leaders (plus serendipitous invitees like me) to discuss difficult topics with the exceptional candor afforded by Chatham House rules. While much of the focus was on broad health policy issues, the proceedings were enlivened by presentations from early-stage biopharma and healthcare investors...
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25
Jun
2025

AI Drug Discovery: A Revolution for the Underdogs

AI won’t revolutionize drug discovery for Big Pharma. They don’t need it. Pharma has been making remarkable biologic molecules for decades. Not just simple blockers, but a dizzying array of sophisticated therapeutics. Bispecific and multispecific antibodies. T cell engagers. “Masked” molecules that activate specifically in the tumor microenvironment. ATP- and pH-controlled antibodies. Binders to integral membrane proteins like GPCRs and...
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25
Jun
2025

The Unsung Community Heroes Who Make Biotech Thrive

Every thriving biotech hub can trace its origins to one or two outstanding scientific institutions. But every thriving region can also trace some of its success back to community leaders. These are people who attend boring night meetings. They aren’t household names. They’re fine with that. These people were especially common in America after World War II. They laid down...
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17
Jun
2025

From Optimization to Agency: Reframing the Future of Personal Health

While medical advances have afforded us the luxury of longer lives, we now spend many of our later years coping with the ravages of chronic illnesses of aging — cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s, and cancer.  Many of these conditions seem linked to long-term exposure to low grade systemic inflammation, a pathological process known as “inflammaging.” ...
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