🤘Brainwaves Play Pink Floyd
IBM unveils an analog AI chip that works like a human brain | 1 in 10 adults in the US has lost a family member to drug overdose | Introducing the GenAI models you haven’t heard of yet | Definitive Healthcare acquires Populi for $52M
Good morning!
Welcome to Healthcare AI News, your weekly dose of the latest developments and headlines in the world of Healthcare AI.
In this issue, we explore:
✅ Headlines: Machine learning technology that may aid personalized cancer
✅ Industry: Amazon clinics push injured employees to keep working
✅ Feature: AI and anti aginig
✅ Interesting Reads: Thanabots is making it possible to talk to the dead
✅ Tech: The downsides of microservices architecture
✅ Venture Pipeline: VBA secures growth funding With $156 Million
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HEADLINE ROUNDUP
HMS: AI beyond the clinic (Read More)
Neuroscientists extracted a Pink Floyd tune from an individual's brain activity: listen to the result! (Read More)
IBM unveils an analog AI chip that works like a human brain (Read More)
Upgrading healthcare security strategies to combat AI-based threats (Read More)
Johns Hopkins researchers developed machine learning technology that may aid personalized cancer (Read More)
MIT News: AI models are powerful, but are they biologically plausible? (Read More)
AI's potential to improve clinical operations, trial matching (Read More)
Google reportedly building A.I. that offers life advice (Read More)
INDUSTRY NEWS
Here are 22 health systems billing patients for certain EHR and text messages (Read More)
Abortion bans increase need for congenital heart defect care, Stanford Medicine study finds (Read More)
Nearly 1 in 10 adults in the US has lost a family member to drug overdose,new KFF poll finds (Read More)
Getting the most your SDOH data capture (Read More)
How Amazon’s in-house first aid clinics push injured employees to keep working (Read More)
Digital Dilemma: hospitals shelling out millions for electronic transactions (Read More)
Meta criticized for making reproductive health an R-rated issue (Read More)
YouTube to prohibit false claims about cancer treatments under its medical misinformation policy (Read More)
THE FEATURE
AI and Anti-Aging: Our newest tool in the battle against time
The fountain of youth may be an algorithm.
And by that, we mean: Anti-aging research and tools are getting an incredible boost from the latest advancements in artificial intelligence.
The longevity field—which sits at the intersection of disease management & prevention, nutrition, genetics, and epigenetics—is getting a lot of investment attention lately. If you peek into billionaire’s investment portfolios right now, you’ll find longevity startups galore. And even generative AI pioneer Sam Altman seems to be getting a slice of the pie.
So why is this area of medical research and innovation so popular lately? And what does that have to do with AI?
Here’s the TL;DR on our take: Longevity researchers, investors, and patients have had to contend with the field’s long time scale. When you’re looking at lifespan-level impacts of different interventions, you’re inherently in for a long ride.
Now, AI is entering the room and asking, “Are you sure about that?”
Today, we’re discussing what the fuss is all about with AI’s impact on anti-aging work.
It’s one of the best examples of how AI can upend the baseline assumptions of any given field. To illustrate this impact, we’ll examine three areas of anti-aging work: research, personalized interventions, and ethics.
Let’s get to it—we’re not getting any younger (yet)!
Speeding up anti-aging research
Ask any drug discovery researcher: The process is filled with excruciatingly long wait times and high rates of failure.
AI speeds up drug discovery overall—including for anti-aging drugs.
It makes sense: AI predicts which experiments are likelier to work. This makes the drug discovery process both more time and cost-efficient.
One example of how this works in practice is the use of DNA-encoded library technology. AI trained on these libraries of billions of compounds learns drug-target interactions. It can suggest compounds that are relatively fast and inexpensive to generate while having a high probability of success.
In fact, this kind of AI-enabled compound identification is what helped a team from the University of Edinburgh uncover three potentially senolytic—age-defying—drugs. It’s also the premise behind the work of biotech Gero, whose hybrid quantum-classical machine-learning model has been lauded for making strides in longevity drug discovery research.
Personalized anti-aging diagnostics and solutions
Aging is an extremely individual aspect of health. That’s why researchers and startups in the longevity field are often focused on personalization.
This is especially true in the case of DTC longevity startups like Tally Health, which launched its personalized longevity subscription service a few months ago. Or even the AI-enabled full-body scans promising personalized early-warning diagnostics of various diseases.
Marketing promises around living a healthier, longer life may appeal to our shared human desire to defy death. Yet, these startups are hyper-focused on the individual longevity-seeking patient. Many of them start with a genetic test that claims to be able to analyze an individual’s biological age—before offering personalized recommendations for longevity interventions based on a person’s unique health and environmental factors.
As you might have guessed, AI makes doing all of that predictive analysis on a large scale much easier. Longevity startups like the (aptly named) Longevity AI—which offers an AI-enabled longevity analytics API for hospitals—are using it to make longevity research more actionable.
The ethical questions of anti-aging with AI
While we’re obviously excited about these advancements, their speed also makes addressing the ethics of AI-enabled longevity work more urgent.
As we race ahead to bring this nascent field of research to providers and patients, we must ask ourselves:
Are we accurately presenting the risks of drugs like metformin alongside the potential longevity benefits?
Are the potential benefits of some of these solutions outweighing the potential harms of inaccurate diagnoses as this technology continues to develop?
As we create this new arena of preventive care, are we including everyone—or only the wealthy?
And remember those billionaires we talked about at the beginning?
Given their extensive investments in this field, it’s not a stretch to imagine they might be the first to get their hands on longevity tech when it becomes available.
What does that mean for longevity tech being the next frontier of preventive health? Only time will tell. But if we’re making predictions, it’s hard not to note that, while some billionaires dedicate part of their fortunes to philanthropy, their existence underscores the very inequality we’re talking about here.
Final thoughts from HAIN
Despite these ethical questions (and it still being the early days of this technology), we think the marriage of longevity and AI is still worth getting excited about.
After all, with longevity research and innovation, we’re reframing what preventive care looks like. Though we may not be there yet, it’s amazing to think how AI has shortened our journey to a future with longer, healthier lives.
Now, we have a question for you. We know Healthcare AI News reaches a wide variety of healthcare leaders.
So, we want to know: How is your corner of the industry (or even your specific organization) thinking about the promises of longevity tech? Are you excited? Wary? Somewhere in between? Reply back and tell us!
INTERESTING READS
TECH NEWS
Introducing the GenAI models you haven’t heard of yet (Read More)
AI shouldn’t have to waste time reinventing ETL (Read More)
The downsides of microservices architecture (Read More)
Evolution of conversational intelligence in healthcare (Read More)
I’ve never written code, but I just passed a Google system design interview (Read More)
VENTURE PIPELINE
A SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM OUR PETS! 🐾
TWEET OF THE WEEK
🎮🧠 According to ESA, 164 million US adults were gamers in 2019 with 75% of households having at least one gamer.
Recent study reveals that older adults playing digital puzzle games 🧩 have memory skills on par with those in their twenties! 🚀
— Healthcare AI Newsletter (@AIHealthnews)
Aug 17, 2023
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