May 8, 2023
“Biology is too complex”
“These new technologies are just hype”
“Our healthcare system is too complicated”
“We already do data science, and it hasn’t delivered”
“Computers can’t understand the messiness of disease”
“The economic incentives in healthcare don’t promote innovation”
“Biology will never be quantified like the laws of physics, it’s impossible”
“We can’t move fast and break things in medicine because lives are at stake”
If you work at the intersection of tech and biology, there’s no doubt you’ve heard all of these statements before. All of the reasons why the status quo will, and should, remain in place. The reasons costs will continue to rise, while life expectancies stagnate. The reasons you’ll fail to affect any change at all.
Our healthcare system is broken.
At over $12,000 per person, the United States has the highest per capita healthcare costs in the world; nearly double that of any other country. But we’re not getting what we pay for. We rank 51st in terms of average life expectancy at birth, which comes in around 77 years; 7 years less than the average lifespan in Japan. During the last few years, life expectancy in the US has actually been going down.
But, at least we’re developing new innovative treatments, right? Well, drug discovery is taking longer and costing more than ever before. According to Scannell et al, the cost of developing a new drug is doubling every 9 years. This is known as Eroom’s law because it looks like the opposite of Moore’s law in computing (the number of transistors on a microchip roughly doubles every two years, whereas its cost is halved in that same timeframe).
Our healthcare system is broken, and everybody knows it.
The status quo is broken, but lots of people in medicine don’t want anything to change. Well, that’s not exactly true—I believe they want the outcomes to change, but they don’t want to change any of the things we do to drive outcomes. They want to keep doing the same things over and over again, but expect different results. Insanity.
What’s the risk of moving fast and breaking things if the system is already broken? The real downside scenario is that we do little or nothing to change things. Costs keep rising, and people keep dying. Given where we are, incremental changes aren’t going to get the job done. It’s going to take bold, radical changes to improve our healthcare system. It may seem risky, and some of the things we try may indeed fail, but at least they have a chance at success.
Medicine needs fewer naysayers and more visionaries.
In our case, we believe that AI will become the new language of biology and it will usher in dramatic changes to how we think about and practice medicine. By advancing AI we will uncover solutions to problems once thought to be impossible, transforming our understanding of the world and ourselves. This transformation of AI will revolutionize healthcare, turning medicine from an art form into a predictive science. By using AI to accelerate clinical innovation, we can bring life-saving treatments to those who need them most and improve the lives of millions of people.
Perhaps you’re already thinking it…
“Biology is too complex”
“These new technologies are just hype”
“Our healthcare system is too complicated”
“We already do data science, and it hasn’t delivered”
“Computers can’t understand the messiness of disease”
“The economic incentives in healthcare don’t promote innovation”
“Biology will never be quantified like the laws of physics, it’s impossible”
“We can’t move fast and break things in medicine because lives are at stake”
Maybe you’re right. But we’d rather take the risk required to make the world a better place than to settle for a broken status quo. Come join us, partner with us, or collaborate with us, but don't stand in our way.
