On the latest episode of the Washington AI Network podcast, host Tammy Haddad is joined by Ted Leonsis, founding partner at Revolution Growth and founder and CEO of Monumental Sports & Entertainment, and Grant Verstandig, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Red Cell Partners and co-founder and executive chairman of Zephyr AI.
In a wide-ranging discussion at The House at 1229, the group explored how AI is transforming patient care and outcomes by analyzing data, identifying patterns, and personalizing treatment plans. When asked about what he was wearing for the occasion, Leonsis said: “I went to ChatGPT today, and I said, ‘I’m giving a speech in downtown D.C., with Grant in AI. There’ll be people from Meta. How should I dress?’” The result was an outfit much like Verstandig’s.
Both guests discussed AI capabilities for maximizing pharmaceutical R&D and revolutionizing the future of healthcare.
Verstandig explained how companies are using AI to identify overlooked potential in existing drugs: “We might be using a drug that is wonderfully safe but wasn’t stunningly efficacious until we added that ingredient. And that’s where really we together are trying to shift the promise … into practice for precision medicine.”
“The drug business is not an easy to manage business,” said Leonsis. “And the regulatory environment on top of it is really, really difficult…We both think there’s a lot of drugs that didn’t make it through FDA or are lying dormant, they never reached their potential. Now, with AI, you can go through, comb through a lot of different iterations and if you…added this ingredient you worked with this treatment, it could pass FDA or solve this other problem’.”
“A big part of what we’re doing … is using our AI to go and seek out, think of it as the key signal that then the … AI will seek in this sea of data. And so now you have all this data plus the … data of all these patients in the wild, plus this next generation DNA sequencing in the blood,” explained Verstandig. “And so if you take those three sort of tectonic plates together, those massive shifts, the innovation that creates out of that is you have new drugs that could literally be incredible novel cures… We might be using a drug that is wonderfully safe but wasn’t stunningly efficacious until we added that ingredient. And that’s where really we together are trying to shift the promise and it’s been a promise because it hasn’t been delivered yet into practice for precision medicine.”
Verstandig on the future of pharmaceuticals: “The reason why the pharmaceutical companies are most interested, they have a lot of data.…You could take a blood test and Tempus could see if there’s DNA from your tumor that has been shed and is existing somewhere in your blood. And what Tempus is able to do is with their tests say this is the amount of circulating tumor DNA and what they’re doing, which is incredible, which is why all these companies in the pharmaceutical space are so interested in Tempus.”
Leonsis spoke further on ethics and healthcare: “My grandchildren are going to live to be 110 years old…Well, there are treatments and medicines and new medicines that we’ll find that will be able to extend your life even further. But the quality of life will then come into play. And so these are really, really big important issues that we will have to wrestle with as a society. ”
When asked about Global competitiveness and the AI race with China, Leonsis said “We might be the most powerful country right now, but when we’re talking about AI and scale, why do you think China has embraced this?…China’s thrilled that AI is on the horizon because they think, oh, this is something we can get bigger, faster, and better. And they’re not shy about control…”
“We need younger Washington,” said Leonsis. “We need people that become evangelists, if you will, for AI, but with the warnings…DC really has a lot of power to make this blossom in the right way or to stop it.”
Verstandig added: “We all have to remember that China is a fundamental economic competitor and great power competitor to us. We never were worried about the economic model of the Soviet Union breaking capitalism. But there’s a model where China’s model with AI is fundamentally different in its ability to compete than what the open capitalist model is. And with BRICS and a number of things they’re doing to Ted’s point, we have the opportunity for AI to blossom. Or if we stifle it, it’s not going to go away like nuclear did. Somebody else will have that power and wield it, and we have to make sure the next hundred years continue as the next great American century, and that’ll come back to AI.”
Leonsis also linked the hesitancy for AI innovation with a history of fear around nuclear innovation. “Nuclear power was demonized…But now nuclear power, everyone goes, it’s clean, it’s safe, it gets rid of oil, all the things that we’re talking about, but we lost 30 years of development,” he explained. “GE was the largest manufacturer of nuclear power plants, and 30 years ago, they shut down that operation. It became a below the line endeavor. They said, ‘This is poison to our business and Wall Street.’ Why? Because the media said, ‘This is a really bad thing.’ Now, in hindsight, that was a really bad call. And we need nuclear power as a part of the tapestry of all of the ways that we’re going to generate energy for the 8 billion people.”
Listen to the full episode on Audioboom, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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