#006 AI for drug discovery - Dr Patrick Walters

Alex Lebrun is cofounder and CEO of Nabla. Having raised $17 million in seed funding, they are developing technology that can listen to medical consultations and automatically generate precise, ready-to-use clinical letters. This innovation not only saves doctors valuable time but also ensures more accurate, consistent documentation, potentially improving patient outcomes. Before launching Nabla, Alex had already established himself as a serial entrepreneur in the AI domain. He previously founded Wit.ai, a natural language platform that was acquired by Facebook, as well as VirtuOz, an AI-driven customer service solution acquired by Nuance in another multi-million-dollar deal. Drawing on his extensive background, Alex shares the strategic decisions and product development insights that allowed him to evolve from these earlier ventures into a technology that addresses critical needs in healthcare. In our conversation, we delve into how Nabla’s system was engineered—from the algorithms that convert speech to text and structure clinical data to the workflow integrations designed to fit seamlessly into a doctor’s routine. Alex outlines the startup’s core use cases, including note-taking in primary care settings and specialized fields where detailed documentation is essential. Beyond immediate applications, he provides a thoughtful perspective on how machine learning can help transform medicine more broadly, enabling more personalized care, better patient engagement, and even aiding in complex diagnostic support down the line. Whether you’re fascinated by AI’s potential in healthcare, curious about building a transformative medical technology company from the ground up, or eager to understand the lessons learned from successful exits to industry giants, this episode offers a comprehensive look at the present and future of AI in medicine. Alex Lebrun Twitter: @lxbrun

Send us a textDr Anders Sandberg is a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. He holds a PhD in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University. His work is wide ranging, including the societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement and new technology, as well as assessing the capabilities and underlying science of future technologies. His research includes work on cognitive enhancement and technical roadmaps on whole brain emulat...

Send us a textFin Moorhouse is a researcher at Longview Philanthropy. Before that, he was a Research Scholar and assistant to Toby Ord at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute. He co-hosts a podcast called Hear This Idea, about about ideas for solving important problems, and the people working on them ranging form AI safety, Biorisk to global development. He writes about effective altruism, existential risk, and ways to improve the (longterm) future on his writing page. We dis...

Send us a textJess Morley is a PhD student at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University. Her work focuses on understanding the ethical, philosophical and practical ramifications of the increasing use of technology in healthcare. She was The lead tech advisor for data-driven technology at UK Department of Health and Social Care. She was a contributor towards the Goldachre review which looked at the efficient and safe use of health data for research and analysis and how this can ...

Send us a textDr James Zou is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Data Science and Computer Science at Stanford University. He works on making machine learning more reliable, human-compatible and statistically rigorous. He received his Ph.D from Harvard in 2014, and was at one time a member of Microsoft Research, a Gates Scholar at Cambridge and a Simons fellow at U.C. Berkeley. He joined Stanford in 2016 and his research is supported by the Sloan Fellowship and the Google and Tencent A...

Send us a textDr. Adam Bataineh is co-Founder of Span Health, a health coaching company driven by data to improve longevity. The company's primary goal was to enhance human performance by assisting members in improving their sleep, nutrition, and exercise routines through scientifically based experiments. In 2022, Span Health was acquired by Eight Sleep for an undisclosed sum.What makes Adam particularly intriguing is his role as a pioneer in the field of Medicine. While Longevity is not typi...

Send us a textVivek Natarajan is an AI researcher at Google Health working to accelerate biomedical AI’s translation from code to clinic and scale world-class healthcare to everyone. In this episode we spoke about about his work in helping to build MedPalm 1 and 2. The two best general medical machine Learning models right now are GPT4 and MedPalm 2 built by Google with both scoring >85% on the USMLE and similar other medical exams. Vivek tells us how his team at Googlehealth built MedPalm...

Send us a textDr Hugh Harvey is managing director at Hardian Health, a healthcare consultancy that provides clinical, research and medical affairs support to AI or healthtech products. After studying medicine at Imperial College London, he trained and worked as a consultant radiologist in the NHS. He then moved to Babylon Health as lead for Regulatory Affairs in Clinical Artificial Intelligence. He also was the editor for Nature Digital. We discussed regulation of AI as a medical device, wher...

Send us a textDr Phillip Pratt is cofounder of Medical iSight, a company that brings augmented reality into the operating theatre. He has a PhD in Neural Systems Engineering from Imperial College London and after a career as a quantitative analyst he was appointed as a research Fellow at the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery.We discussed the technology behind this tool and future implementations it may have to improve surgery in the future.You can find Dr Philip Pratt at:Twitter: @phili...

Send us a textDr Patrick Walters is chief data officer at Relay Therapeutics, a company that uses computational techniques to transform the drug discovery process. Since being founded in 2016, the company IPOs in 2020, and is currently valued at $2 billion. And we discussed the computational models that relay uses in the work and how they pair these with wet lab experiments to improve the speed and accuracy of drug discovery. Dr Patrick Walters Twiter: @wpwaltersRelay Therapeutics Twitt...