The Harry Glorikian Show
139 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 27 ratingsAt The Harry Glorikian Show, I, Harry Glorikian, am your host. In short, I have talks with leaders in the healthcare & life sciences industry about the ongoing data-driven transformation of their industry.
From new ways to diagnose & treat patients, bring down costs & creating new value, all the way to AI algorithms that increase efficiency & accuracy, better data is revolutionizing healthcare.
I turn to doctors, hospital administrators, IT directors, entrepreneurs, & others for help mapping out the changes & their impact on everyone from patients to researchers.
Welcome to the show!
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
How Caristo is Using AI to Reduce Heart Attack Risk
March 12, 2024 11:00 - 1 hour - 58.9 MBIf you learned that radiologists looking at CT scans for the traditional signs of coronary artery disease catch only 20 percent of the people who actually have a high risk of a heart attack, and if you learned that there’s a new AI-based test that can catch subtle signs of inflammation in the other 80 percent of patients—well, you’d probably want to get that test yourself, right? Harry's guests this week, Frank Cheng and Keith Channon, are from a UK-based company that has developed just such...
Why Deep Origin Is Betting on Both Physics and AI for Drug Discovery
February 27, 2024 12:00 - 51 minutes - 47 MBInvestors and companies in the life science industry have been betting a lot of money over the last few years on a single idea: that computation will help us get a lot better at developing new drugs. But the word “computation” covers a pretty broad range of techniques. And the reason that there are dozens if not hundreds of computational drug discovery startups popping up is that everyone has their own hypothesis about what specific kind of computation is going to be the most powerful. For ...
How ConcertAI Came to Lead in Cancer Data
January 30, 2024 12:00 - 1 hour - 55 MBIf you look back at all the health-tech and drug development companies Harry has hosted on the show, an interesting pattern starts to emerge: a very large number of those companies have gone on to enormous growth and success in their markets. It could be that being on the podcast is like a catapult to success—or it could be that we're pretty good at finding companies that are already on a promising trajectory. Either way, there's no better example than Concert AI. The company’s CEO, Jeff E...
T Cell Engagers: The New Cancer Drug?
January 16, 2024 12:00 - 38 minutes - 35.2 MBOne of the most amazing successes in the battle against cancer over the last two decades has been the introduction of antibody drugs that harness the body’s own immune system to kill tumor cells. Finding those drugs may sound like a biology problem rather than a machine learning or a big-data problem. But actually, these days, it’s both. Harry's guest this week is Leonard Wossnig, who’s the chief technology officer for a UK company called LabGenius. The company uses a combination of syntheti...
How Pangea Is Using AI to Find New CNS Drugs in Nature
December 19, 2023 12:00 - 58 minutes - 53.5 MBThe combination of better data and more powerful computing is helping researchers reinvent the process of discovering new drugs. Within 5-10 years, we’ll likely see a huge wave of new medicines that were either discovered or designed using AI—drugs that will finally help us get control of our most stubborn health problems, from cancer to cardiovascular disease to obesity and metabolic disorders to neurodegenerative diseases. And the biotech startups that will do most to contribute are the on...
AI and Microbiomes 101 with Jona
December 05, 2023 12:00 - 54 minutes - 49.9 MBThere are about 30 trillion human cells in your body, but there are about 38 trillion bacterial cells, mostly hanging out in your large intestine. And that’s not even counting all the viruses, fungi, protists, and other microbial cells that live on your skin, in your bloodstream, and all around your body. So in effect, what you think of as you is not really you. You’re actually a walking colony of many different organisms. All of which cooperate peacefully, for the most part—unless the balan...
Modicus Prime Safeguards Drug Manufacturing
November 21, 2023 12:00 - 44 minutes - 40.8 MBQuality control is one of those things that only a select few people pay attention to—until something goes wrong, then everyone cares. That's especially true in the drug manufacturing industry, where episodes like cross-contamination in a drug factory can shut down a production line and create instant shortages of important medicines. And if a contaminated medicines ever does get shipped out to clinics or stores, people’s lives can be at stake. So drug makers are usually pretty receptive tow...
AI Isn't Magic, But It Can Save Lives, says HDAI's Nassib Chamoun
November 07, 2023 14:42 - 1 hour - 66.8 MBThere’s a lot of talk out there about how artificial intelligence will change the way doctors and nurses take care of patients; you hear some of it right here on this show. But all of that still feels like a forecast rather than a present reality. When you look really closely, it’s hard to find concrete examples where AI is already helping healthcare providers make better decisions that improve patient outcomes and take costs out of the system. That’s why Harry wanted to have Nassib Chamoun...
We Can All Live to 120...and Beyond
October 24, 2023 11:00 - 58 minutes - 53.4 MBThere’s a good chance that we’re all going to live a lot longer than we think. Or at least, that’s what Harry's guest Sergey Young argues in his book The Science and Technology of Growing Young. Young is an investor who leads a $100 million venture capital fund called the Longevity Vision Fund, and through his investing, he says he meets innovators who are coming up with the technologies that will extend our healthy lifespans not just by years but by decades. Those technologies include bette...
Scott Penberthy & Google AI for Healthcare
October 10, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 73.3 MBIt's practically the theme of our show that AI is going to change almost everything about the way drugs get developed and the way healthcare gets delivered. But there’s probably nobody better placed to see how this transformation is already happening than Harry's guest this week, Scott Penberthy. Scott works at Google Cloud, where he’s the director of Applied AI in the Office of the CTO. He and his team work with Google’s big corporate customers, including a variety of customers in healthc...
How to Build a Medtech Startup in High School
September 26, 2023 11:00 - 40 minutes - 36.9 MBBuilding any kind of startup is hard. Starting a business in healthcare or medical technology is even more challenging, given the long timelines for product development and all the regulatory requirements companies have to meet. But imagine how much harder it would be to start a company if you were still just a senior in high school! Recently Harry learned about a company called Vytal that’s building eye-tracking technology to measure brain health, and he knew he wanted to have the co-foun...
How exponential growth is changing the world
September 12, 2023 11:00 - 56 minutes - 51.5 MBIf 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...
How to make Generative AI in Healthcare Safe, with Huma.ai's Lana Feng
August 29, 2023 11:00 - 49 minutes - 45.7 MBIt’s been less than a year since OpenAI opened up ChatGPT to the general public, and less than six months since OpenAI introduced GPT-4, the large language model that currently powers ChatGPT. But in that brief time, the new crop of generative AI tools from OpenAI and competitors like Google and Anthropic has already started to transform the way we think about managing information. We’re entering an era when machines can generate, organize, and access information with a level of accuracy, sp...
Handheld Ultrasound by Butterfly Network: Faster, Cheaper, Better
August 15, 2023 18:10 - 53 minutes - 49.4 MBHarry's guest this week is Joe DeVivo, the new CEO of Butterfly Network. The company's goal is to make it radically easier for doctors or medical technicians to perform an ultrasound exam on any part of the body, and radically cheaper for a patient to get one. The companyt makes an FDA-cleared, handheld ultrasound scanner called the Butterfly iQ. The first big thing that’s different about the iQ is that it uses silicon-based microelectromechanical sensors, instead of a traditional piezoelect...
AHA: Ask Harry Anything!
August 01, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 59.7 MBThis week Harry's guest is....Harry! We're flipping the script and giving Harry a chance to wax eloquent about AI in healthcare and drug research, the growing role of personal health monitoring devices, the unique features of the Boston life science ecosystem, the meaning of the recent downturn in biotech investment, the most common mistakes made by new entrepreneurs, and much more. This week's guest interviewer is Wade Roush, who hosts the tech-and-culture podcast Soonish and has been the b...
Debunking large language models in healthcare with Isaac Kohane
July 18, 2023 11:00 - 58 minutes - 53.4 MBHarry's guest this week is Dr. Isaac Kohane, chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the new book The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond. Large language models such as GPT-4 are obviously starting to change industries like search, advertising, and customer service—but Dr. Kohane says they're also quickly becoming indispensable reference tools and office helpmates for doctors. It's easy to see why, since GPT-4 and its ilk can offer...
Non-standard Amino Acids in the Development of New Medical Therapies
July 05, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 55.2 MBIn the same way that written English is built around an alphabet of just 26 letters, all life on Earth is built around a standard set of just 20 amino acids, which are the building blocks of all proteins. And just as we've invented special characters like emoji to go beyond our standard letters, it turns out that biologists can expand their repertoire of powers using non-standard amino acids—those that either occur rarely in nature, or that can only be made in the lab. GRO Biosciences, a spi...
Dog Cancer Cure: Fidocure by Christina Kelly Lopes
June 20, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 56.5 MBOwning a dog can be a joy, but one sad downside is that dogs are highly prone to cancer—six million of them are diagnosed with the disease in the U.S. each year. Harry's guest this week, Christina Lopes, is co-founder and CEO of a company called One Health that's working to improve cancer outcomes for our canine friends. The company offers a precision cancer diagnosis and treatment service called FidoCure that takes what we’ve learned about genomic testing of tumors in humans and uses it in ...
How Beacon Biosignals Brings Precision Medicine in Neurology to the Brain
June 06, 2023 11:00 - 42 minutes - 39 MBUnlike cancer, brain diseases like epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, or depression don't tend to have easily measured biomarkers that could help doctors tailor treatments, or that could help researchers develop more effective drugs. So in neurology and psychiatry, the precision medicine revolution hasn't really arrived yet. But Beacon Biosignals, where Harry's guest Jacob Donoghue is the co-founder and CEO, is trying to change all that. Beacon is focused on making electroencephalography into ...
Your Next Doctor is a Chatbot? Language Models, Google Researchers, & MedPaLM-2
May 23, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 55.4 MBLarge language models are already changing the business of search. But now they’re about to change the practice of medicine. Harry's guests, Vivek Natarajan and Shek Azizi, are both researchers on the Health AI team at Google, where they're pushing the boundaries of what large language models can achieve in specialized domains like health. This spring their team announced it would start rolling out a new large language model called Med-PaLM 2 that’s designed to answer medical questions with...
Going Boldly into Biomanufacturing and Bioeconomy with Inscripta
May 09, 2023 11:00 - 55 minutes - 50.6 MBHarry's guests this week are Sri Kosaraju, the CEO of Inscripta, and Richard Fox, a former Inscripta scientist who just rejoined the company as its SVP of Synthetic Biology. In reabsorbing Infinome—the Inscripta spinout Fox described to Harry in a spring 2021 episode of the show—Inscripta is placing a big bet on biomanufacturing, the creation and fermentation of genetically customized microbes that can pump out medical, agricultural, and nutraceutical products, and more. Inscripta had prev...
Drug Discovery with 1910 Genetics: Knowing Your Tools
April 25, 2023 11:00 - 49 minutes - 45.2 MBHarry's guest this week, Jen Nwankwo, is the founder and CEO of a drug discovery company in Boston called 1910 Genetics. Her PhD is in pharmacology, which shows through in her practical focus on fixing the drug discovery process to get more and better therapies into the hands of doctors. To hear Jen tell it, 1910 Genetics is focused on finding the most promising new drug candidates for stubborn health problems—and it takes a refreshingly agnostic approach to everything else. The company do...
Cry Me a Biomarker: Using Tears to Screen for Cancer
April 11, 2023 11:00 - 42 minutes - 38.7 MBTears are a signal of more than just our emotions. The liquid in tears comes from blood plasma, and contains a lot of the same proteins and other biomolecules that circulate in the bloodstream. But what this liquid doesn’t have are a lot of the extra components like antibodies that would get in the way if you were looking for specific biomarkers—such as the low-molecular-weight proteins released as a byproduct of the inflammation around tumors. Harry's guests Anna Daily and Omid Moghadam a...
Insilico Brings Generative AI to Drug Development and Discovery
March 28, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 81.7 MBIt may feel like generative AI technology suddenly burst onto the scene over the last year or two, with the appearance of text-to-image models like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion, or chatbots like ChatGPT that can churn out astonishingly convincing text thanks to the power of large language models. But in fact, the real work on generative AI has been happening in the background, in small increments, for many years. One demonstration of that comes from Insilico Medicine, where Harry's guest this...
Raphael Townshend on The Power of Small Molecule Drugs
March 14, 2023 11:00 - 42 minutes - 38.8 MBThere have been a lot of stories in the news over the last few months about AI chatbots like ChatGPT that can respond to your questions with convincing and well-written answers. These so-called large language models can tell you how to build a treehouse, how to bake a cake, or how to sleep better. But notice that word large. Behind the scenes, these models have learned which word tend to cluster together by sifting through hundreds of billions of pieces of data—basically the entire Internet,...
How the Glaucomfleckens are Humanizing Medicine, One Laugh at a Time
February 28, 2023 12:00 - 49 minutes - 45.3 MBThe medical news publication STAT calls Will Flanary “the Internet’s funniest doctor.” The guests we bring on the show usually talk about how technology is changing healthcare, but Will and his wife Kristin are changing healthcare in a very different way—through comedy. A former standup comic who trained as an ophthalmologist and runs a successful ophthalmology practice in Oregon City, Oregon, Will is better known by his alter ego “Dr. Glaucomflecken.” His short videos have millions of views...
Stephen Kingsmore's Quest to Test Every Baby with Genome Sequencing
February 14, 2023 12:00 - 42 minutes - 39.2 MBThere's a quiet revolution happening in the field of genetic screening of newborns. Within the last couple of years it’s become possible to sequence the entire genome of a newborn baby, all six billion base pairs of DNA, and diagnose potential genetic disorders in about 7 hours. That’s already happening in a handful of hospitals, with a focus on babies who are showing symptoms of rare genetic disorders. But within five years, says Harry's guest, Dr. Stephen Kingsmore, it should be possible t...
Arterys Medical Imaging Jumpstarts the AI Revolution in Radiology
January 31, 2023 12:00 - 27 minutes - 25.5 MBLast October, medical imaging company Arterys announced that it had been acquired by healthcare AI giant Tempus. That caught our attention here at The Harry Glorikian Show, because back in the fall of 2018—exactly 100 episodes ago, as it turns out—we welcomed Arterys co-founder and CEO Fabien Beckers as our guest. At the time, Arterys had recently won FDA clearance for a cloud-based software platform that used deep learning to help radiologists automatically locate the contours of the vent...
Measuring brain activity - Ryan Field on the Harry Glorikian Show
January 17, 2023 12:00 - 57 minutes - 52.9 MBYou can wear an Oura ring or a WHOOP armband to tell you how your body is adapting to exercise. A continuous glucose monitor can send your phone information about your blood sugar levels are changing. And during the pandemic, a lot of people bought home pulse oximeters to monitor their blood oxygenation levels. But there’s one part of the body where home health sensors haven’t reached yet, and that’s our brains. They're protected inside our thick skulls, which means it’s pretty hard to measu...
Grail's Josh Ofman on the Revolution of Cancer Screening
January 03, 2023 12:00 - 1 hour - 58.1 MBOut of all the dozens of types of cancer that occur in humans, we habitually screen for only five: breast, cervical, colon, prostate, and lung. But what if there were a single test that could detect 50 types of cancer, based on a simple blood draw? That's exactly what's possible today, thanks to the Galleri test, introduced by Illumina spinoff Grail in 2021. The $949 test, which won breakthrough designation from the FDA in 2019, uses machine learning to assess the patterns of methyl groups—m...
Carlos Ciller – AI Is The Window To The Soul At RetinAI
December 20, 2022 12:00 - 1 hour - 55 MBThese days, there's an explosion of digital imaging technology for almost every part of the body. There are the familiar types of imaging everyone knows, like CT scans, MRIs, ultrasound, and of course, X-rays. But now doctors and medical researchers are also exploring newer types of digital imaging technology, such as Optical Coherence Tomography, or OCT. OCT uses near-infrared light that penetrates just a couple of millimeters into a tissue such as an artery wall or the retina of the eye. ...
January's Noosheen Hashemi on Preventing Diabetes by Promoting Gut Health
December 06, 2022 12:00 - 46 minutes - 42.9 MBThere are many causes for diabetes—chronicallly high blood sugar—but there’s also a growing list of ways to prevent it, or manage it once it starts. Wearable technologies like continuous glucose monitors or CGMs are high on that list. These devices have tiny needles that penetrate the skin and measure glucose levels in the interstitial fluid between cells. They can send that data to a smartphone, where apps made by a variety of companies can record it and analyze it. January.ai is one such ...
At Univfy, Mylene Yao Is Making IVF More Predictable and Affordable
November 22, 2022 12:00 - 56 minutes - 52.2 MBAbout half a million babies are born every year through IVF. That number would probably be a lot higher if the procedure were cheaper and more accessible—but making that happen would mean transforming IVF from an artisanal craft into something more like a modern automated factory, with AI helping doctors and technicians make faster and better decisions at every step. And that’s exactly what Harry's guest Mylene Yao, the co-founder of Univfy, is doing. Univfy helps patients with two aspect...
Episode 100! Illumina's Phil Febbo on the New Era of Low-Cost Genome Sequencing
November 08, 2022 12:00 - 52 minutes - 48.3 MBFor the 100th episode of The Harry Glorikian Show, Harry welcomes Phil Febbo, chief medical officer at Illumina. The San Diego-based company is the leading maker of the high-speed gene sequencing machines that are at the core of the precision medicine revolution. The company has an 80 percent market share, which means that if you or your loved one has had any sequencing done for any reason, chances are your samples were sequenced on an Illumina machine. Gene sequencing is already a key part ...
David Sable is Still Working on Making IVF More Accessible
October 25, 2022 11:00 - 1 hour - 58.8 MBIn 1978, Louise Joy Brown was celebrated as the world's first "test tube baby," born as the result of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Today, Brown is 44 years old, and what was a technological triumph in 1978 is almost routine today, with half a million babies born every through IVF. But Harry's guest this week, gynecologist and investor David Sable, thinks IVF still isn’t nearly as reliable or accessible as it should be. From his studies of infertility services, he’s convinced that society is...
How H1 Is Networking the Healthcare World, with Ariel Katz
October 11, 2022 11:00 - 35 minutes - 32.3 MB“LinkedIn meets ZoomInfo meets Zocdoc, but for doctors." That’s how H1 co-founder and CEO Ariel Katz describes the information service his company offers. It's a response to the fact that the healthcare is incredibly fragmented, with no central database or platform that everyone can use to share their professional profiles and get in touch with colleagues. (Physicians never adopted LinkedIn for this kind of networking because they just don’t switch jobs very often.) Without a central directo...
Erwin Seinen Says the Paper Lab Notebook Is Finally Dying with eLabNext
September 27, 2022 11:00 - 44 minutes - 40.9 MBIf you walked into a typical life science research lab at a university or a biotech startup, you might be surprised to see how much paper is still laying around. A lot of researchers still keep records of their experiments and studies in paper notebooks—in fact, along with doctor’s offices, life sciences labs might be one of the last bastions of professional life that surrenders to digitization. But these labs are surrendering. And Harry's guest this week, Erwin Seinen, is helping to accel...
How Rune Labs Uses Data to Improve Prospects for Parkinson's Patients
September 13, 2022 11:00 - 51 minutes - 46.9 MBHarry's guest this week, Brian Pepin, says there haven’t really been any advances in the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease in a decade. The standard treatment is still the standard treatment—meaning various drugs to replace dopamine in the brain, since the loss of neurons that produce dopamine is one of the hallmarks of the disease. But there has been one important change during that decade. Thanks to new technologies, ranging from wearables like the Apple Watch to sophisticated deep brain i...
Proscia Pushes Pathology Down the Digital Path
August 30, 2022 11:00 - 56 minutes - 51.6 MBIn most hospitals, the practice of radiology went digital years ago. Today you'll rarely find a radiologist examining a broken bone or a fluid-filled lung on a sheet of old-fashioned X-ray film. But pathology isn't as computerized. For a variety of cultural, technical, and regulatory reasons, many pathologists still prefer to look at tissue samples the old-fashioned way, on a slide under a microscope. Philadelpha-based Proscia is working to change that—and open up pathology to the power of ...
Vibrent Health - the Catalyst for Mobile Healthcare
August 16, 2022 11:00 - 58 minutes - 53.3 MBWe use our smartphones to communicate, shop, navigate, watch videos, take pictures, share our lives on social media, track our exercise, and listen to music and podcasts. So why shouldn’t they also be the main interface to our healthcare experiences? That’s the question P.J. Jain started out with in 2010 when he left behind a career in networking and telecommunications to start a company dedicated to mobile health. Called Vibrent Health, the company went on to win a game-changing contract in...
Life Science Labs Can't Be Automated, But They Can Be Orchestrated
August 02, 2022 11:00 - 58 minutes - 53.2 MBWet labs at life science companies look and work the same pretty much everywhere. They're full of incubators, refrigerators, centrifuges, liquid handlers, gene sequencers, DNA and RNA synthesizers, and all sorts of other complex equipment. And a lot of these machines are automated—but the larger workflow in a life sciences R&D lab is very much not automated. For the most part it’s individual researchers who decide how and when to use each piece of equipment, and individuals who move samples ...
Rare-X Wants to Build the Data Infrastructure for Rare Disease Research
July 19, 2022 11:00 - 57 minutes - 52.5 MBFor people with common health problems like diabetes or high blood pressure or high cholesterol, progress in pharmaceuticals has worked wonders and extended lifespans enormously. But there’s another category of people who tend to get overlooked by the drug industry: patients with rare genetic disorders that affect only one in a thousand or one in two thousand people. If you add up all the different rare genetic disorders known to medicine, it’s a very large number; Harry's guest this week, C...
How WHOOP Uses Big Data to Optimize Your Fitness and Health
July 05, 2022 11:00 - 56 minutes - 51.6 MBMost fitness gadgets, like the Fitbit or the Apple Watch, encourage you to get out there every day and “close your rings” or “do your 10,000 steps.” But there’s one activity tracker that’s a little different. The WHOOP isn't designed to tell you when to work out—it’s designed to tell you when to stop. Harry's guest this week is Emily Capodilupo, the senior vice president of data science and research at Boston-based WHOOP, which is based here in Boston. To explain why the company focuses on...
How RxRevu is Fixing the Disconnect Between Your Doctor and Your Pharmacy
June 21, 2022 11:00 - 34 minutes - 31.6 MBWhen your doctor prescribes a new medicine, there's a pretty good chance that some snafu will crop up before you get it filled. Either your pharmacy doesn't carry it, or your insurance provider won't cover it, or they'll say you need "prior authorization," or your out-of-pocket cost will be sky-high. The basic problem is that the electronic health record systems and e-prescribing systems at your doctor’s office don’t include price and benefit information for prescription drugs. All of that i...
Eric Daimler at Conexus says Forget Calculus, Today's Coders Need to Know Category Theory
June 07, 2022 11:00 - 56 minutes - 51.5 MBHarry's guest Eric Daimler, a serial software entrepreneur and a former Presidential Innovation Fellow in the Obama Administration, has an interesting argument about math. If you’re a young person today trying to decide which math course you’re going to take—or maybe an old person who just wants to brush up—he says you shouldn’t bother with trigonometry or calculus. Instead he says you should study category theory. An increasingly important in computer science, category theory is about the r...
Lokavant Wants to Help Good Drugs Succeed in Clinical Trials, and Help Bad Ones Fail Faster
May 24, 2022 11:00 - 51 minutes - 47.3 MBHarry's guest this week is Rohit Nambisan, CEO of Lokavant, a company that helps drug developers get a better picture of how their clinical trials are progressing. He explains the need for the company's services with an interesting analogy: these days, Nambisan points out, you can use an app like GrubHub to order a pizza for $20 or $25, and the app will give you a real-time, minute by minute accounting of where the pizza is and when it’s going to arrive at your door. But f you’re a pharmaceu...
What Kids Can Learn from Social Robots, with Paolo Pirjanian
May 10, 2022 11:00 - 52 minutes - 47.8 MBThis week Harry continues to explore advances in "digital therapeutics" in a conversation with Paolo Pirjanian, the founder and CEO of the robotics company Embodied. They’ve created an 8-pound, 16-inch-high robot called Moxie that’s intended as a kind of substitute therapist that can help kids with their social-emotional learning. Moxie draws on some of the same voice-recognition and voice-synthesis technologies found in digital assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Home, but it also has a...
How Akili Built a Video Game to Help Kids with ADHD
April 26, 2022 11:00 - 51 minutes - 46.8 MBCan a video game help improve attention skills in kids with ADHD? According to Akili Interactive in Boston, the answer is yes. They’ve created an action game called EndeavorRx that runs on a tablet and uses adaptive AI to help improve focus, attentional control, and multitasking skills in kids aged 8 to 12. And it’s not just Akili saying that: In 2020 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration agrees cleared EndeavorRx as a prescription treatment for ADHD, based on positive data from a randomize...
Fauna Bio Awakens Medicine to the Mysteries of Hibernation
April 12, 2022 11:00 - 53 minutes - 49.3 MBWhy is hibernation something that bears and squirrels do, but humans don’t? Even more interesting, what’s going on inside a hibernating animal, on a physiological and genetic level, that allows them to survive the winter in a near-comatose state without freezing to death and without ingesting any food or water? And what can we learn about that process that might inform human medicine? Those are the big questions being investigated right now by a four-year-old startup in California called Fa...
Finally, a Drug Company Listens to People with Hearing Loss
March 29, 2022 11:00 - 57 minutes - 52.4 MBIn a day and age when it feels like there are drugs for everything—from restless legs to toenail fungus to stage fright—it's strange the drug industry has almost completely ignored one of our most important organs: our ears. Given that 15 percent of people in the U.S. report at least some level of hearing loss, you’d think drug makers would be doing more to figure out how they can help. Well, now there’s at least one company that is. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Decibel Therapeutics went p...