Year ahead Outlook from BiotechShowcase & Wuxi during JPM 2024

During the annual #JPM2024 healthcare conference week, by some accounts, 10,000 health technology professionals descended upon the city of San Francisco. Besides the flagship J. P. Morgan conference and #BiotechShowcase conference, there were numerous other conferences and events during the day and fancy and festive receptions during evening to late night hours. Broadly speaking, JP Morgan conference focused more strongly on discussions and company presentations regarding new products in the pipeline, their financial progress and outlook and operational changes. The conference put up by Sara Jane Damy at @DemyColten and @EBDgroup, is called an investor conference and focuses on sharing news and information and collaborative platforms including one on one partnering events to enable attendees to connect based on mutual interest and shared goals to help advance to next stage. 

I will try to summarize a few things that I heard at #BiotechShowcase and during an afternoon of premier event by wuxiforum@wuxiapptec.com as well as what I surmised about the general mood from my interactions. 3100+ attendees and 900+ investors were in attendance at  the BiotechShowcase conference and related events like DigiMed Showcase and SeedShowcase at and around the Hilton, San Francisco. Wuxi conference also took place at the Hilton.

• Money, funding strategy, & investment outlook in the year ahead: There seemed to be considerable interest in the money side of things in the year ahead. There were several panels focusing on discussions pertaining to funding and even panels on specific therapies often alluded to and/ or focused on raising money. A panel on sickle cell disease therapies for instance, discussed the availability of capital on the private versus public side. As the funding has become tighter, emerging companies are faced with decisions regarding spend for product launches. Some underfund launches and as a result underperform and some overfund with costs that do not add value. Panel of experts from Syneos Health, Akari Therapeutics, Eidos, and Tarus discuss that aspect of business.  A panel from J&J, Merck, Astellas, and Regeneron discussed business development and partnering landscape with big pharma.  A panel from KKH, Khosla Ventures, TRx Capital and Sanofi discussed how to get noticed and get investors and biopharma to see the financial value in digital health technologies.  Syneos Health shared from its long term study,  findings and prospective view of partnering and licensing landscape for the year ahead. A panel from NYU Langone, Breakout Ventures, Boom Capital and Novo Nordisk discussed challenges to attracting early seed financing and strategies to extend the runway. There were more discussions on transformative business models and a panel discussed the state of the funding environment in the year ahead. Expert panel shared advice for companies currently fundraising, discussed best practices and strategies to successfully navigate through the early phase to managing risks and get to exits in a challenging market. 

In general, the mood looked upbeat with a creative array of strategies to help navigate in a challenging environment and exciting product pipelines pointing to a more promising year ahead.

• Role of #AtificialIntelligence, Machine Learning, Virtual Reality and other digital technologies in #healthtech: A panel discussed the impact of digital health technologies, incorporating digital medicine into the workflow and it’s role in maintaining adherence. Another panel of experts from DiMi, AliveCor, SVB, Continuum Health and Genealis reflected upon how digital health is poised to transform healthcare and highlighted recent collaboration models and the considerations that come into play for patients, payers, companies and investors. Use of advanced algorithms to identify molecules with greater speed may revolutionize treatments with less cost. AI will have a huge impact on obesity, metabolic disorders, type II diabetes and more. Also exciting is the impact of digital technologies like #VirtualReality, artificial intelligence and Biosensing technologies converging with on #MentalHealth. These technologies will enable mental health assessment and impact to be more objective and functional.

As tech tools become more sophisticated, clearly they are poised for a huge impact on #healthcare. The impact they could have on mental health is indeed very exciting. We can anticipate incredible impact not just in diagnosing and treating but also in predicting and pre-empting mental health conditions emerging from life traumas. 

• Regenerative Medicine: This was a huge focus given that regardless of strides in early treatments of diseases, tissues and organs get damaged by age, disease, trauma and improvements are now becoming possible with tissue engineering, cellular and genetic therapies. With convergence of health technologies new solutions are emerging. It is too vast a field and beyond my scope for detailed discussion. There were several exciting panels on this topic.

• RNA Therapies: There is an increasing focus on RNA therapies and possibilities they bring for personalized medicines as well as for treatment for rare diseases like sickle cell disease. Advances in drug delivery vehicles will continue to bring RNA therapies more into prominence.

• Health Equity & Access: Both at Biotech Showcase and Wuxi, panels of experts discussed the importance of removing barriers and improving healthcare access and equity for all. A panel at Biotech Showcase also discussed women’s health that is garnering increasing attention and funding. However, as noted by a panelist, the check sizes are often smaller when it comes to women’s health. According to Fortune Business Insights, the market for women’s health is expected to grow to $40 billion by 2027 across therapeutics and medical devices. 

There was a general mood of optimism during the JPM 2024 week. As observed by Gabe Cavazos from Leerink Partners, the sentiment has been at an all time low and it can only go up from here. On an even more optimistic note, news coming from JPM indicates that many big pharma companies have exciting products in the pipeline and several well capitalized companies in stealth mode are making strides.

Data Readiness in Healthcare to Unlock AI Potential

What Is Data Readiness? In simple language, it consists of all the tasks required to ensure that artificial intelligence (AI) platforms learn from reliable and relevant data sources.

What is the state of data readiness in healthcare?  According to a recent report, lack of data readiness is preventing healthcare leaders from driving rapid, effective, measurable and sustainable transformation and this impedes their ability to execute. 

Over 90 percent of healthcare executives mention prepping for data readiness as their top priority. A vast majority of them are planning to invest in technologies designed to improve data readiness and support systemic interoperability. According to the report, in addition to financial issues and staffing capacity crunch, interoperability is another issue that is blocking innovation. Interoperability is key for a seamless transition achievable through unlocking the full potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare. 

As in financial, auto and other industries, AI is expected to have a huge impact on health care delivery, access and on financial and clinical outcomes in health. Healthcare as an industry transitions to newer systems at a much slower pace. Tendency is to pour money into older technologies that tend to create more data silos, as remarked by Abhinav Shashank, co-founder & CEO of Innovaccer.  

The crisis is so acute and the promise of closing the data readiness gap to realize the full potential of digital transformation is so immense that it is imperative to act on it. 

An exciting panel at @TiEcon2022 moderated by Chris Waugh, Chief Innovation Officer at Sutter Health with panelists Prat Vemana, Chief Digital Officer at Kaiser Permanente and Abhinav Shashank, Founder & CEO at Innovaccer will address the challenges and opportunities of data readiness in healthcare and the promise it holds in enhancing industry collaboration to improve outcomes and reducing costs. 
Register ASAT at www.tiecon.org to avail of early bird incentives.

Hardware enabling Artificial Intelligence Revolution – Panel at TiEcon

From virtual doctors to hassle free data maintenance to driverless cars and robotic surgeries, artificial intelligence (AI) has been transforming the way we live, work, learn, and conduct business.  But it is only now, as powerful GPUs have become available to train networks, that the technology has become more practical and it’s use more strategic. 

At Road to TiEcon event on July 22, an exciting panel of senior leaders across a range of industries, will discuss how hardware is enabling the AI revolution. Panelists include Chris Rowen, CEO at @BabbleLabs & founder of #Tensilica; Gaurav Singh, Corporate VP at @XilinxInc; Gordon Wilson, CEO at Rain Neuromorphics @Rain_AI; and Sumit Gupta, VP of AI strategy & CTO, Data & AI at @IBMData @IBMcloud @IBM cognitive systems. This will be an exciting panel.

The algorithmic superiority of certain complex functions comes only with high computation and memory and this requirement poses significant challenges to the hardware platforms required to execute these functions. The AI teams under proven leaders, are in constant quest for new devices, architecture and algorithms that would lead to improved efficiency. 

Sign up for this exciting panel and entire event at the link below. https://www.tiecon.org/?campaign=Referral&source=DaNa  

Summit, IBM supercomputer is our recent hero in the fight against Covid-19

The looming threat of Covid-19 and the grim reality of the toll that novel coronavirus takes on humankind, makes it imperative that we find a way to prevent the spread faster and with less cost. Currently nine out of ten drug therapies fail mostly between phase 1 trials and regulatory approval. The estimated cost of developing a new treatment is around staggering US $2.6 billion.  While this article won’t address it, I want to mention that many bio/pharma companies are working with repurposed drugs to find a cure and at least 69 drugs have been identified as treatment possibilities. Drugs also have side effects and need to be tested for safety. Let us focus for a while on search for the vaccine.

Many companies including Moderna, CureVac and BioNTech are working on vaccines. With the help of  Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and other technologies the hunt for new pharmaceuticals and appropriate chemicals is expected to be quicker, cheaper and more effective. Novel coronavirus presents the most unprecedented challenge to date because of the speed with which it spreads. 

Who better than a supercomputer made by a company that has been on the cutting edge of innovation for over a century, to take on this speed challenge? IBM scientists instructed the world’s fastest computer to tackle this challenge at its Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Summit can run 200 quadrillion computations per second. The scientists ran thousands of simulations to analyse which drug compounds could stop the coronavirus from infecting the host cells. 

Summit, an IBM supercomputer equipped with the “brain of AI” identified 77 compounds (from over 8000 compounds) that could be efficacious in preventing coronavirus from spreading in the host.  This is promising news in humanity’s quest for an effective vaccine against the virus. These findings are published in the journal ChemRxiv and give us hope although road is still long to get there.

With increasing computer processing power and advanced algorithms, AI has been employed to analyze large data sets with greater efficiency and will likely lead to many exciting innovations.  While AI and ML show promise to change every industry sector for the better, artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning have become the most widely discussed topics in the healthcare sector and the excitement keeps growing.  

I will be looking forward to hearing about new innovations AI/ML at #TiEcon2020. Stay tuned for new dates for the conference at http://www.tiecon.org and on this blog.

AI/ML Bootcamp at TiEcon2020

Artificial Intelligence emphasizes the development of machines that think and reason like humans. As this technology is becoming more and more sophisticated where machines are acquiring an ability to learn, reason and self-correct, the applications of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are expanding and are becoming relevant to almost all professional areas. 

At TieCon 2020, a bootcamp focused on AI/ML will provide an overview of the methodologies and its implications in many professions. Experts in the field will share information on deploying and monetizing AI applications. 

Dr. Ronjan Nag will lead the workshop. Dr. Nag co-founded the technology company Lexicus that was acquired by Motorola in 1993 and Cellmania that was acquired by Research in Motion in 2010. Later, he served as Vice-President of both Motorola and Blackberry, and served as Chairman of Eratz Labs, which specializes in ML. Currently, Dr. Nag is a Fellow at Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute and is founder and managing director of R42 Group. 

In addition to Dr. Nag, AI/ML bootcamp speakers will include several experts. Dr. David Stevens is an IP attorney specializing in patent prosecution, due diligence, infringement, right-to-practice, freedom-to-operate, licensing and litigation. Dr. Eric Saund, Principal of Saund Laboratories has over 50 patents, is widely published and his prototypes have served thousands of users. Vaidhi Nathan has 30+ years of experience as an entrepreneur and business leader and was founder and CEO of IntelliVision, an AI/Analytics focused company for videos and cameras that was acquired by Nortek Security and Control.  Matteo Colombo has 18 years of information technology and consulting experience and is currently senior executive at KPMG.

In this bootcamp, attendees will learn the basics of how AI techniques work so they can effectively lead data science teams, evaluate business potential of AI projects before investing and critically evaluate AI products for business deals. This is a not-to-miss workshop for professionals who are attending #TiEcon2020 and work in AI/ML related field and need to expand their knowledge base. Registration is open at www.tiecon.org 

 

Healthcare and High-tech combining to combat Coronavirus Covid-19

As coronavirus is raging on, entrepreneurs and scientists are called upon to come up with innovative ways to deal with this deadly virus. For instance, after 11 Israelis were quarantined after disembarking from a cruise ship in Japan, Israel has become a “Living Lab” for technologies to treat the virus.  Israel, which has a large digital health sector, put out calls to entrepreneurs for proposals for new solutions to contain and combat the disease. Meanwhile, China is also taking a lead in exploring how futuristic technologies powered by artificial intelligence can help identify coronavirus symptoms, find new treatments, and track the spread of the disease.  Chinese scientists sequenced its genome and shared around the world within weeks.

 

Unlike MERS, but more like SARS, Coronavirus is very contagious and has a long incubation period when people feel fine as they unknowingly walk around, infecting others. After identifying infected people, it is challenging to care for them while trying to contain the disease. Some healthcare workers who cared for coronavirus patients have themselves died of infection. We also heard that even after learning of highly contagious and deadly CD-19 coronavirus, some healthcare workers from the USA were “improperly deployed” when sent to assist in bringing home the patients infected in China.

 

In caring for coronavirus patients, human touch needs to be avoided and assistance should be provided remotely. Robots and automated technologies are of great help here. Robots are being used to disinfect rooms, take laundry items, help check for symptoms and disease progression, deliver medications and communicate with family and healthcare providers.  Robots help disinfect surfaces and help in killing viruses and bacteria by emitting ultraviolet light.  Drones and self-driving vehicles can deliver medications and supplies, petrol public places, spray disinfectants and do general surveillance. 

 

Silicon Valley’s largest entrepreneurship conference, TiEcon 2020 has a dedicated track on health technologies. Amidst growing fears of coronavirus becoming a pandemic, emerging technologies like drones, robots, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning Digital Health and TeleHealth are likely to be game changers. Investors and entrepreneurs alike are focusing on the space with great interest. There will likely be exciting conversations as entrepreneurs from several countries (depending on travel restrictions), converge at TiEcon 2020, at Santa Clara Convention Center in CA, on May 8 and 9. If interested, you can register for the conference at www.TiEcon.org  

 

Exciting Emerging Technologies track at TiEInflect 2018

From keynote with a catchy title “Silicon to Science Fiction” to a dedicated track on “Emerging Technologies”, TiEInflect 2018 will explore new innovations that may potentially change our world, turn our lives upside down and profoundly impact us; from retail to health to business, and influence how we interact, and whom we interact with. Virtual reality, Augmented Reality, Autonomous vehicles and Artificial Intelligence will reshape the world in which we live, work, encounter health challenges, solve them and the world in which we play.

The Emerging Tech track has panels and speakers who are playing in this hot area and will discuss and explore the trends and opportunities. AI and AR/VR have gained momentum, the hype has begun to settle down, and serious discussions are happening, among investors. How will investors define risk for technologies that do not exist and have yet to define penetration and acceptance by the audience? What sort of government policies will emerge and how will the policies intersect with investment decisions?

Participate in the emerging technologies track at the largest #entrepreneurship conference @TieInflect 2018 and through an exciting mix of keynotes, panelists, industry professionals and interested stakeholders and visionaries get an early insight into how emerging technologies will elevate human experience, in the years to come. Registration is open at www.tieinflect.org

The Imitation Game – Movie Review

A three-rotor Enigma with plugboard (Steckerbrett) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Based on a series of true events, the movie tells the story of how a team of young bright mathematicians cracked the Nazi code that helped the Allies win World War II.  Prominent among them was, a brilliant, young Alan Turing, who was a British computer scientist, mathematician, logician, philosopher, marathon runner and is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.  And he was a homosexual.  A small seemingly irrelevant details about his sexual orientation, at a time in history when homosexuality was a crime, also makes this beautiful movie, a devastatingly sad one.

Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) was recruited by British Intelligence Agency M16 to crack Nazi codes, including Enigma, which was considered unbreakable.  Turing’s team included Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), Hugh Alexander (Matthew William Goode), Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong), and John Cairncross (Allen Leech).

During World War II, strongest weapon of the Axis forces were their Enigma machines, which were largely unbreakable and enabled them to plan and communicate their strategy, unhindered.  Turing and his team built a machine to break the code, that allowed Allied forces to intercept Axis communications and gave them access to information that ultimately helped the Allied forces win the war.

Alan Turing Statue at Bletchley Park – geograph.org.uk – 1591025 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The focus of the film is primarily on the time that Turing spent at Bletchley Park.  Bletchley Park was the central site of UK’s top secret, code breaking operation.  It is presumed that the “Ultra” intelligence produced at Bletchley shortened the war by two to four years, and that without it the outcome of the war would have been uncertain.  Besides Turing’s team, there were a whole cadre of brilliant young women working on manual code breaking, and “Bletchley Circle”, a mini series, recently aired on PBS, tells the story of four women who reunite years later to track down serial killers.

In 1939 however, this was such a top secret operation that everyone was forbidden to share any details of their work.  At the end of the war, these unsung heroes of the war, quietly went home.  The movie is also a sort of an indictment of Britain’s shoddy treatment of these heroes, primarily Turing, who was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual behavior and he accepted oestrogen injections (equivalent to chemical castration), to avoid prison.  In 1954, Turing committed suicide.  His is a story that needs to be told and kudos to Director, Morten Tyldum and Screenplay writer, Graham Moore for bringing it to the screen.  Cumberbatch has done a fabulous job as Turing.

On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being excellent, I rate the movie as 4.8.