Of all the industries AI will transform, Kira Radinsky believes chemistry and biology will change the most.
Kira is the co-founder and CTO of Diagnostic Robotics, which uses AI to automate the administrative work that's crushing healthcare teams — so clinicians can actually focus on patients. She's also the co-founder of Mana.bio, where they're accelerating drug discovery by orders of magnitude.
She'll tell you she's terrible in the lab. Not because she isn't brilliant, but because she can't pipette without killing the cells. So she’s thrilled that thanks to her skills in data and AI she was able to realize her childhood dream of being a scientist:
“I'm not trying to automate everything… Like when, when you say automate drug discovery, I'm not gonna discover everything. I just want to accelerate it, which comes back to my childhood dream: I just didn't want to do it myself. I just want AI to replace me as a scientist. That's it.”
But this episode is about more than healthcare. It's about how to build systems that get smarter over time — feedback loops, causal inference, incentivizing algorithms to take risks, and knowing when to optimize for ROI instead of accuracy. Lessons that apply whether you're building in biotech or not.
We cover:
- How growing up Jewish in Soviet Ukraine — and fleeing to Israel just before the Gulf War — shaped Kira's obsession with predicting the future
- How she built a system that successfully predicted real-world events, including Cuba's first cholera outbreak in Cuba in 130 years
- How Mana.bio is using AI to build "rocketships" that deliver drugs to the right cells — and how they've done in three months what used to take 20 years
- Why predictions are only valuable if there's something you can do about them — and why that makes healthcare an ideal field for AI
- How to incentivize algorithms to make bolder predictions (it's easy to predict there won't be an earthquake today; it's much harder to say there will be)
- Why causal inference is the most underrated tool in machine learning right now
- How healthcare AI can perpetuate racial bias — and what builders need to do differently
Note: this interview originally aired in October 2024.
Chapters:- (01:44) - Why predictions are so important to Kira: lessons from fleeing Soviet-era Kyiv
- (05:10) - Building a prediction engine from 150 years of news
- (08:35) - How Kira predicted the Cuba cholera outbreak
- (09:50) - Returning to biology by way of data
- (12:50) - Predicting healthcare outcomes by finding your patient's twin
- (17:53) - The racial bias hiding in healthcare AI
- (19:15) - Building Mana.bio and accelerating drug discovery
- (24:33) - "In three months, what did what used to take 20 years"
- (31:44) - Builder tips: ROI, causal inference, and teaching algorithms to explore
- (35:07) - Planning: Where generative AI needs improve
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Music by Jonathan Zalben
What is Future Around & Find Out?
You know what would be awesome? If we could build the future we want — before we muck it up.
Future Around & Find Out helps builders think clearly about AI and emerging technologies, grapple with the implications, and decide what to build next.
Independent technologist and former NPR journalist Dan Blumberg speaks with founders, makers, and you to celebrate breakthroughs, call BS on the hype, explore how things might go sideways — and how we can steer the future in the right direction.
The Webby Awards have honored the show (formerly known as CRAFTED.) as a top tech podcast three years in a row!
On Tuesdays, we feature interviews with the builders changing how we work, live, and play.
On FAFO Fridays, futurist Kwaku Aning joins Dan for a playful recap of the week in tech, including the amazing, the scary, and the strange.
You’ll also hear about innovations that too often get overshadowed by AI, including in deep tech, biotech, fintech, quantum computing, robotics, blockchain, and more.
Across it all, you’ll hear sharp takes on what comes next and what builders need to know now.
So let’s Future Around & Find Out together!
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