Harry'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 piezoelectric crystal element, to generate and receive the ultrasound waves. That means the device is fully digital, rather than analog.  The second big thing that’s different is that the iQ transmits the ultrasound data to a standard iPhone or iPad instead of a big, expensive ultrasound cart. The doctor or technician can see the live ultrasound image right on a handheld device, and use the image to aim the sensor correctly to get the best possible picture to make a diagnosis. All of that is bringing down the cost of equipping a clinic with ultrasound technology dramatically, and over time it should also bring down the cost of administering an ultrasound exam. It also opens up the possibility of adding AI assistance to the software, so that doctors or technicians can get usable images with less training. The net result is that Butterfly is making it economically feasible to use ultrasound for diagnostic imaging in a lot more places, including clinics in developing countries where ultrasound was out of reach before due to the high cost of the technology and a shortage of trained ultrasonographers.

For a full transcript of this episode, please visit our episode page at http://www.glorikian.com/podcast 

Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:

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This 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 behind-the-scenes producer of The Harry Glorikian Show ever since Harry started the show in 2018.

For a full transcript of this episode, please visit our episode page at http://www.glorikian.com/podcast 

Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:

1. Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. 

2. Navigate to The Harry Glorikian Show podcast. You can find it by searching for it or selecting it from your library. Just note that you'll have to go to the series page which shows all the episodes, not just the page for a single episode.

3. Scroll down to find the subhead titled "Ratings & Reviews."

4. Under one of the highlighted reviews, select "Write a Review."

5. Next, select a star rating at the top — you have the option of choosing between one and five stars. 

6. Using the text box at the top, write a title for your review. Then, in the lower text box, write your review. Your review can be up to 300 words long.

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That's it! Thanks so much.

Harry'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 high-quality medical insights, and can also quickly auto-generate text such as prior authorization, lowering doctors' daily paperwork burden. But it's all a little scary, since there are no real guidelines yet for how large language models should be deployed in medical settings, how to guard against the new kinds of errors that AI can introduce, or how to use the technology without compromising patient privacy. How to manage those challenges, and how to use the latest generation of AI tools to make healthcare delivery more efficient without endangering patients along the way, are among the topis covered in Dr. Kohane's book, which was co-written with Microsoft vice president Peter Lee and journalist Carey Goldberg.

For a full transcript of this episode, please visit our episode page at http://www.glorikian.com/podcast 

Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:

1. Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. 

2. Navigate to The Harry Glorikian Show podcast. You can find it by searching for it or selecting it from your library. Just note that you'll have to go to the series page which shows all the episodes, not just the page for a single episode.

3. Scroll down to find the subhead titled "Ratings & Reviews."

4. Under one of the highlighted reviews, select "Write a Review."

5. Next, select a star rating at the top — you have the option of choosing between one and five stars. 

6. Using the text box at the top, write a title for your review. Then, in the lower text box, write your review. Your review can be up to 300 words long.

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In 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 spinout from the laboratory of the renowned synthetic biology pioneer George Church at Harvard Medical School, is one of the companies working to explore the exciting applications of non-standard amino acids (NSAAs), and Harry's guest this weeks is GRO's co-founder and CEO, Dan Mandell. He says NSAAs could help overcome some of the limitations that keep today’s gene and protein therapies from being used more widely, while also expanding the kinds of jobs that protein-based therapies can do.

For a full transcript of this episode, please visit our episode page at http://www.glorikian.com/podcast 

Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:

1. Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. 

2. Navigate to The Harry Glorikian Show podcast. You can find it by searching for it or selecting it from your library. Just note that you'll have to go to the series page which shows all the episodes, not just the page for a single episode.

3. Scroll down to find the subhead titled "Ratings & Reviews."

4. Under one of the highlighted reviews, select "Write a Review."

5. Next, select a star rating at the top — you have the option of choosing between one and five stars. 

6. Using the text box at the top, write a title for your review. Then, in the lower text box, write your review. Your review can be up to 300 words long.

7. Once you've finished, select "Send" or "Save" in the top-right corner. 

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That's it! Thanks so much.

Owning 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 veterinary clinics. Vets can submit a dog’s tumor sample for DNA sequencing, and FidoCure's report will show whether the animal has specific mutations that could help determine which cancer drug will be most effective. Harry and Christina talk about how that process works, why dogs are more vulnerable to cancer in the first place, where she got the idea for the company, and how One Health's work could benefit dogs and humans alike.

For a full transcript of this episode, please visit our episode page at http://www.glorikian.com/podcast 

Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:

1. Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. 

2. Navigate to The Harry Glorikian Show podcast. You can find it by searching for it or selecting it from your library. Just note that you'll have to go to the series page which shows all the episodes, not just the page for a single episode.

3. Scroll down to find the subhead titled "Ratings & Reviews."

4. Under one of the highlighted reviews, select "Write a Review."

5. Next, select a star rating at the top — you have the option of choosing between one and five stars. 

6. Using the text box at the top, write a title for your review. Then, in the lower text box, write your review. Your review can be up to 300 words long.

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That's it! Thanks so much.

Unlike 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 a more reliable and useful data source for diagnosing and treating neurological disease. 

EEG is a non-invasive way to measure electrical activity in the brain, and it’s been a common medical tool for almost 100 years. But takes a lot of training for a human doctor to interpret an EEG correctly. It’s slow, it’s expensive, and it’s a bit of a dark art—all of which makes it the perfect candidate for machine learning analysis. Donoghue says the goal at Beacon Biosignals is to use computation to get more value out of existing EEG data. By peering deeper into the data, he thinks it should be possible to identify subtypes of problems like epilepsy or Alzheimer’s, and help neurologists understand which patients will respond best to which therapies. On top of that, better EEG measurements could also give drug developers and regulators more clinical endpoints to measure when they’re trying to evaluate the safety and efficacy of new drugs for CNS diseases. If Beacon’s vision comes true, the precision medicine revolution might finally start to reach the brain.

For a full transcript of this episode, please visit our episode page at http://www.glorikian.com/podcast 

Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:

1. Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. 

2. Navigate to The Harry Glorikian Show podcast. You can find it by searching for it or selecting it from your library. Just note that you'll have to go to the series page which shows all the episodes, not just the page for a single episode.

3. Scroll down to find the subhead titled "Ratings & Reviews."

4. Under one of the highlighted reviews, select "Write a Review."

5. Next, select a star rating at the top — you have the option of choosing between one and five stars. 

6. Using the text box at the top, write a title for your review. Then, in the lower text box, write your review. Your review can be up to 300 words long.

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Large 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 high accuracy. (The model got an 85 percent score on the U.S. Medical License Exam, the test all doctors have to take before they’re allowed to practice.)  It's been clear for a while that consulting with an AI would eventually become an indispensable part of every medical journey—whether you’re a patient searching for information about your symptoms, or a doctor looking for an expert second opinion. And now that such a future is almost here, the work Vivek and Shek are doing at Google feels both exciting and a little bit scary.

For a full transcript of this episode, please visit our episode page at http://www.glorikian.com/podcast 

Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:

1. Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. 

2. Navigate to The Harry Glorikian Show podcast. You can find it by searching for it or selecting it from your library. Just note that you'll have to go to the series page which shows all the episodes, not just the page for a single episode.

3. Scroll down to find the subhead titled "Ratings & Reviews."

4. Under one of the highlighted reviews, select "Write a Review."

5. Next, select a star rating at the top — you have the option of choosing between one and five stars. 

6. Using the text box at the top, write a title for your review. Then, in the lower text box, write your review. Your review can be up to 300 words long.

7. Once you've finished, select "Send" or "Save" in the top-right corner. 

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Harry'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 previously focused on a benchtop "bio-foundry" machine called Onyx that that makes programmed edits to bacterial or yeast cells at thousands of different points in their genome in parallel. Now it's pivoting away from selling the machine and instead focusing on becoming a power user of its own technology. Its ultimate plan is market multiple biomanufactured products, starting with a synthetic form of bakuchiol, an alternative to the anti-aging compound retinol.

For a full transcript of this episode, please visit our episode page at http://www.glorikian.com/podcast 

Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:

1. Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. 

2. Navigate to The Harry Glorikian Show podcast. You can find it by searching for it or selecting it from your library. Just note that you'll have to go to the series page which shows all the episodes, not just the page for a single episode.

3. Scroll down to find the subhead titled "Ratings & Reviews."

4. Under one of the highlighted reviews, select "Write a Review."

5. Next, select a star rating at the top — you have the option of choosing between one and five stars. 

6. Using the text box at the top, write a title for your review. Then, in the lower text box, write your review. Your review can be up to 300 words long.

7. Once you've finished, select "Send" or "Save" in the top-right corner. 

8. If you've never left a podcast review before, enter a nickname. Your nickname will be displayed next to any reviews you leave from here on out. 

9. After selecting a nickname, tap OK. Your review may not be immediately visible.

That's it! Thanks so much.