Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to BIOTECH NATION !!! With understandable interviews requiring no background in science, BTN attracts a wide global audience. From everyday people looking for hope in treatments in development, to bioentrepreneurs interested in the experience of their fellow travelers, to venture capitalists looking for possibilities in cutting-edge breakthroughs, to scientists simply interested in the work of others, BioTech Nation is the voice of human endeavor, driving science to new realities for everyone. These interviews are drawn directly from the public radio program, "Tech Nation", which also can be heard in numerous global radio and podcasting venues.
We hear about one medical or health innovation after another. But how long does it take for it to become standard practice? Tech Nation Health chief correspondent, doctor Daniel Kraft. Daniel, welcome back.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:Great to see you on the radio.
Dr. Moira Gunn:On the radio. We can see everybody. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Now one thing that we all know about and I know you trace again and again is just innovation.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Medical innovations, health innovations, and yet innovation is one thing, but it has to get to people. It has to get into medical practices when it takes doctors and healthcare institutions to make it part of their system and and normal treatments. What is that gap that we're talking about between the time we've innovated and it actually gets into use?
Dr. Daniel Kraft:Yeah. The the classic the, given example is it takes 17 years for something being published in a journal like New England Journal of Medicine to then become common practice. And that's frankly too long. We can't wait 17 years for a new drug to be discovered, and to make a clinical impact. And so I think there's a bit of a new focus on there's different terms like translational medicine.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:Going from something being published and known and proven to something that's gonna be useful at the bedside or the website. And a lot of that's being driven by our new era of big data and AI that can start to make sense of the data. We're sort of awash in data. Data is sort of the new oil as it were. But oil is a bit of so what.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:You want the the oil to turn into gasoline to power your car to get somewhere in a sense. And so we have an opportunity to take all these new massive data sets that are becoming more available, low cost gene sequencing, data from electronic medical records, from wearables and the digital environment, all the way to, things that might be recorded in telemedicine and your Internet of Things home to take those massive data sets are often siloed and take them from data to insights. And then those insights can hopefully then translate to something. If I'm seeing you in the clinic, moire as my patient, I'm not just sort of thinking back to some journal article I may or may not have read that cited some 10 year old double blind placebo controlled trial. I could be looking at the crowdsourced data from 1,000 or maybe millions of patients like you and using that to do the right workup, to run the right test, to pick the right therapy.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:It might be a drug, a gene therapy, a digital therapeutic. And so, my hope and what a lot of folks are working on is for starting to connect all these new forms of data and insights, crowdsourcing them from around the world and enabling patients to become data donors. So we can build a bit of a new model for how we, do clinical trials, how we learn in real time, and how we can learn from each other in this new era of sort of crowd sourced health and medicine.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now along the way, there has to be some, I don't know what you would call, challenges, resistances, obstacles. I mean, it has to be accepted, at each of these steps. Where are the resistances and how might they be overcome?
Dr. Daniel Kraft:Well, a big concern resistance obviously of of course is privacy. Everyone wants most folks want to keep their medical data relatively private. I know I think the next generation, they'll share everything. And, right, it may not be their HIV diagnosis, but they're willing to share their blood pressure and their vitals and their sleep, particularly if it can help them and other patients like them. So I'm trained as a pediatric oncologist.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:Almost every kid is part of a clinical trial who might have be unfortunate to have cancer. That's helped really catalyze new learnings to cure many cancers in children. And now in adults, only 20% or less of adults are in part of clinical trials. But now almost everybody can opt in to sharing their health and medical data. And it be it can be done in safer and more reliable ways using technologies like like blockchain, to keep data anonymized and accessible only by folks who should access it.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:But I like to sort of think about the future of health knowledge, sort of like how we've shifted how we do our driving. You know, 15 years ago, we still used to drive with paper maps. Remember those? Now it would be hard to imagine getting around without Google Maps or Waze. And Google Maps or Waze are crowd sourced data, shared by other drivers on the road.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:You might not know it, but I could tell if I interrogated your Google data, where you were at 2 am last Thursday. But when you put that data together, we could get the knowledge of-
Dr. Moira Gunn:Because you knew.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:I knew.
Dr. Moira Gunn:We were both in Florida.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:We were in Florida. But but what gets exciting is is, you know, you want that hyperlocal data about the folks driving down the 280 highway near San Francisco. You don't really care about the highways in New York, what's happening in Paris. Same thing for healthcare. If you can start to glean knowledge from other patients for clinicians.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:In fact, I've been helping a startup called Stuff That Works. Health, that's website out of Israel where patients, thousands of them now are sharing their what's working or not working for certain diseases. And it can help individuals then learn what's going to work for my plantar fasciitis or for my long COVID or for my migraines. And hopefully that sort of crowdsource knowledge will integrate into our medical records and into the medical workflows of clinicians. So that when you're seeing a patient, you don't have to look for that randomized, very narrow study.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:We can glean knowledge from thousands of patients in your hospital system or from around the planet.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Well, it makes such sense. Yes. We're doing very, very significant and considered trials with more and more people until we can say, yeah, this is safe enough and effective enough that we're going to approve this drug. And then we let it in the wild. And like all these people use it, but we don't know anything about it.
Dr. Moira Gunn:The truth is is that we need to be able to make that into a constant cycle because it will save lives. It may not save your life, but what you're doing may save someone else's and vice versa. You may be standing there, but because other people contributed, it will inform yours. So it has to be a mindset change for everyone.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:Great. And realizing that we do sort of make that data available and shared, including what drugs are working or not working. We might even understand how we might repurpose a drug for a rare disease that it wasn't being applied for in the past. So there's a real power in sharing information about drugs, what's working, what's not working, connecting that to diseases that often don't have cures today. You just aired on technician, my friend, Doctor.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:David Fagerbaum, a professor at UPenn, who's launched EveryCure, a nonprofit to help build amazing datasets and insights to match an already FDA approved drug that might be sitting on the shelf that might cure diseases like he has Castleman's disease that was cured by a generic drug. So really exciting ways to, encourage folks to become data donors. And we need to build that into our health system. So you could do an easy share button, to unleash some of your data to help others. And eventually I think this sort of blends into sort of this era of, just like we have crowdsource maps.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:Those are impacting self driving cars. I was in San Francisco a few months ago, and I had my first ride in a self driving car from a company called Waymo. And what's exciting about it, it was very exciting the first time. You know, you press the button in the app, this car drives up with how to driver. You get in and it takes you to where you're going.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:And so my insight was what if healthcare was a little bit more like self driving? So imagine a future of health and medicine where our health journeys were more like an AI enabled self driving car experience. They were sort of on demand and knew where you wanted to go, what your destination was before it arrived. You knew what the pricing was because it was transparent, unlike your healthcare systems. Their journey would adapt based on the weather and the traffic and was informed by crowdsourcing 100 and 1000 of journeys by other cars on the same streets.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:It would adapt to the weather, the traffic, your preferences. The driver's always alert, unlike your your doctor or your nurse who might need to sleep. And that had a beautiful intuitive user interface, again, with transparent pricing that would, get you from here to there, you know, faster, better, cheaper. Not gonna replace all taxis or Ubers or Lyfts, but a taste of how some of those lessons from crowdsourcing and AI and big data and smart maps, could apply to our sort of self care, health care journeys of the the near future.
Dr. Moira Gunn:But we won't call it Waymo. We'll call it way waymo. Way way more than this.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:Healthmo. Healthmo.
Dr. Moira Gunn:You
Dr. Daniel Kraft:know, and what's interesting in this sort of new, you know, self health era, you can now go online now and access lots of things that used to require a doctor visit. It could be through telehealth. I think we're gonna enter this era of what I like to call not just, you know, generative AI, which is certainly really impacting healthcare, but generative health where we can create those health environments around us that are really going to help us stay on track or not just to improve the behavior or provide those virtual environments or digital fingerprints and nudges that really match our age, culture, language, incentives, and our health journey. So it's an exciting time now to go from big data to insights to action. And again, speed up, not practice incremental medicine, but exponential medicine and health for all where we can take these lessons and and speed up their impact around the planet.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Great points. Great points. Hey. Thank you, Daniel. Come back soon.
Dr. Daniel Kraft:Thank you Moira, and and and I hope I'll hear about your your self driving, health care journeys of the of the near future.
Dr. Moira Gunn:TECHNATION Health chief correspondent, doctor Daniel Kraft, is the founder and chair of NextMed Health on the web at nextmed.health and digital.health. More information about Daniel at danielcraftmd.net.