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The logo for Isomorphic Labs is displayed on a tablet in this illustration.
Meet Isomorphic Labs, the Google spinoff that aims to cure you
In 2024, Demis Hassabiswon a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work in predicting protein structures through his company, Isomorphic Labs. The lab, which broke off from Google's DeepMind in 2021, raised $600 million from investors in a new funding round led by Thrive Capital on Monday. The company did not disclose a valuation.
Isomorphic uses artificial intelligence to discover new drugs through its AlphaFold technology, which was at the center of Hassabis’s Nobel win last year. Ultimately, Hassabis wants to do something that’s not exactly simple: He’s vowed to “solve all disease with the help of AI.”
Isomorphic is already working with big pharmaceutical companies such as Eli Lilly and Novartis, inking deals with the two drugmakers last year worth $3 billion. It plans to use the new money to improve its AI tools and to move its drugs toward clinical testing.Tulsi Gabbard hugs President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 12, 2025.
Gabbard and RFK Jr. confirmed by US Senate
On Thursday, the Senate voted to confirmRobert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary. The vote also went along party lines, 52-48, with McConnell also voting with Democrats against Kennedy.
RFK Jr., like Gabbard, has set off alarm bells. Ian Bremmer, founder and president of Eurasia Group, says Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement is “set to shake up health policy” in the US. MAHA, says Bremmer, is “a worldview that blends concerns about corporate influence on healthcare with skepticism towards mainstream medicine.” It’s also made up, notes Bremmer, of wellness culture, vaccine hesitancy, alternative medicine, and deep state conspiracy – and it crosses ideological divides. It is, in a word, messy, and will almost certainly do what its proponents promise: upset the status quo on health policy in the US.Graphic Truth: How much booze do Americans and Canadians drink?
US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is sounding the alarm that drinking alcohol is linked to cancer, and he’s calling for a rethink on the federal government’s guideline for how much alcohol is safe to drink. Right now, US government guidelines recommend that men consume no more than two drinks per day, and women have no more than one.
His call comes at the right time for Dry January when many choose to forego alcohol and focus on New Year’s resolutions. But the effort comes at the wrong time for the restaurant industry, which depends on alcohol sales to make a profit, especially as food and labor costs rise, and as inflation-weary diners are cutting back on eating out.
But consumers may already be heeding his warning. According to the WHO and the CIA’s Factbook, both Canadians and Americans have cut back on their drinking since booze consumption surged during the pandemic.
Vice President Kamala Harris waves to members of the media as she boards Air Force Two at Sky Harbor in Phoenix on Oct. 11, 2024.
Harris challenges Trump on his health: “Your turn”
Vice President Kamala Harrisreleased her medical records this weekend, confirming she is in “excellent health” and “possesses the physical and mental resiliency” necessary for the presidency. Harris then accused Republican rival Donald Trump of withholding his records, claiming he “doesn’t want the American people to see whether or not he’s fit” for office.
Critics have raised concerns over Trump’s mental health – citing erratic statements at campaign rallies – and ability to serve a full term, but his campaign quickly pushed back on Harris’ challenge,quoting Trump’s doctor as saying he’s in “perfect and excellent health.” They also took aim at Harris, claiming she “does not have the stamina” to match Trump’s “busy and active campaign schedule.” Still, Trump has not released his full medical record.
Harris’ campaign reportedly hopes the release of her health information will also contrast with Trump’s comparative lack of transparency. While the vice president is ahead in national polls, battleground states are still too close to call, and her campaign is looking for any edge it can find – including a doctor’s note.A doctor checks the progress of a patient with tuberculosis at the Beijing Chest Hospital March 31, 2009. Health officials gathered in Beijing on Wednesday warned against deadly drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, which are spreading fastest in developing countries that lack the infrastructure to tackle the disease.
Please cough for the AI
What if an artificial intelligence stored on your phone could listen and hear how sick you are? Google is training a bioacoustic AI model called Health Acoustic Representations with 300 million snippets of audio collected from around the world — of people sneezing, coughing, and breathing. The goal? To spot tuberculosis early and treat it.
A whopping 1.3 million people died of tuberculosis in 2022 alone, according to the World Health Organization, and 10.6 million fell ill with the disease. “TB is a treatable disease, but every year millions of cases go undiagnosed — often because people don’t have convenient access to healthcare services,” Google’s Shravya Shettywrote in a blog post. “Improving diagnosis is critical to eradicating TB, and AI can play an important role in improving detection and helping make care more accessible and affordable for people around the world.”
Google is focused first on preventing tuberculosis in India and is partnering with an Indian company called Salcit Technologies, whose own AI app Swaasa is being used by healthcare providers on the subcontinent. Swaasa will integrate Google’s model to improve its own detection of the disease.
Patient has an eye test at Venice Family Clinic in Venice, California, June 25, 2009.
Your new insurance advocate is AI
Health insurers are routinely using artificial intelligence and algorithms to evaluate insurance claims, but now the tables have turned. Doctors are increasingly turning to generative AI to write appeals for prior authorizations and to fight insurance denials.
A survey from the American Medical Association found doctors and their staff spend an average of 12 hours a week dealing with such denials, which insurance companies routinely issue, even in serious cases including cancer and HIV/AIDS care. Now, with the help of HIPAA-compliant apps like Doximity GPT, physicians can use the power of AI to generate persuasive reply letters, citing all the relevant medical research they need, in minutes.
One physician even told the New York Times that he tells the bot to make his letters four times longer: “If you’re going to put all kinds of barriers up for my patients, then when I fire back, I’m going to make it very time-consuming.”
So the next time you find yourself annoyed by a glitchy AI chatbot customer service, just remember, AI might help you get lifesaving drugs one day.
The G42 logo.
Hard Numbers: Microsoft’s big Gulf investment, Amazon’s ambitions, Mammogram-plus, Adobe pays up, Educating Don Beyer
1.5 billion: Microsoft has announced a deal to invest $1.5 billion in G42, an artificial intelligence firm based in the United Arab Emirates that recently cut ties with Chinese suppliers that had raised US security concerns. Washington and Abu Dhabi relations have been strained over the UAE’s ties to Chinese tech companies. But this deal – which grants Microsoft a minority stake in the company – could signal a new era of relations with the US.
33: Amazon is talking about artificial intelligence – like, a lot. In his recently published annual letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy mentioned AI 33 times. The company invested $4 billion in Anthropic, which makes the Claude chatbot, and will host Anthropic on Amazon Web Services. Jassy said the company wants to build AI models more so than applications (think GPT-4 instead of ChatGPT) and sell directly to enterprise clients.
40: Clinics are starting to offer an AI-assisted add-on to typical mammograms. Interested patients typically incur an out-of-pocket charge between $40 and $100 to have an AI model scan their breast screening for additional insights — even, possibly, early breast cancer detection.
3: Adobe is planning to compete with OpenAI’s Sora video model. To do so, it’s offering photographers and videographers $3 per minute to upload videos of people doing everyday activities like walking around or sitting down, or simple shots of hands, feet, or eyes to train their new generative AI model. It’s an expensive but cautious approach intended to build up a comprehensive database while staying on the right side of copyright law and avoiding potential imbroglios like the one OpenAI faces for using YouTube videos to train its models
73: Congressman Don Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia, decided he wanted to return to school to learn more about AI. So, that’s what he did. The 73-year-old car dealership mogul-turned-politician recently enrolled in a master’s degree program in machine learning at George Mason University. He’s even learning to code, which he says is helping him better think about all kinds of problems in Washington.A man uses a chatbot in this illustration photo.
Get AI out of my health care
You fall and break an arm. Doctors set the break and send you to rehab. It’s pricy, but insurance should take care of it, so you submit your claim – only to be denied. Was it a claims examiner who rejected it? Or AI?
On Feb. 6, the US government sent a memo to certain Medicare insurers clarifying that no, they cannot use artificial intelligence to deny claims. While machine-learning algorithms can be used to assist them in making determinations, an algorithm alone cannot be the basis for denying care.
This memo, sent by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, follows lawsuits against health insurers for allegedly using AI to erroneously deny deserved care to patients. United Healthcare and Humana have each been sued by patients claiming the companies used the AI model nH Predict nefariously — a model they claim has a 90% error rate. It’s a clear and present danger of the technology at a time when many regulators and critics are focusing on far-off threats of AI.
CMS also said it’s concerned about the propensity for algorithms to “exacerbate discrimination and bias” and said the onus is on insurers to make sure these models comply with the Affordable Care Act’s anti-discrimination requirements. And it’s not just the federal government: A number of states including New York and California have issued warnings to insurance companies to ensure their own algorithms aren’t discriminatory.