Tech Tonics

Inspired by health technology from the age of five, Griffin Weber has pursued this passion both doggedly and joyfully. Now an associate professor of medicine and bioinformaticist at Harvard, Griffin spends his days doing what he loves, leveraging technology to pragmatically improve the health and the care of patients.

Griffin grew up in Virginia, the son of a mathematics professor and a professional artist. While his parents had left NYC, they retained their affection for the city, which they expressed through life-size renderings that seem lifted from subway stations – see here.

While many – perhaps most – of our guests describe a career of wandering and exploration, Griffin seems to have had a clear sense of what he wanted to do from the time he was five years old when first inspired by the intersection of human health and cutting-edge technology. He was profoundly interested in understanding “how things worked,” and was especially captivated by the Jarvik-7, the first artificial heart implanted in a patient in December 1982.

In college at Harvard, Griffin pursued bioengineering, but over time found himself ever more intrigued by the power of computers and how they might solve the needs of hospitals. He soon wound up engaged in a series of software projects for hospitals, discovered that he really enjoyed this work, and decided that it was to be the focus of his career.  Griffin continued his training at Harvard Medical School in the Health Science and Technology (HST) program and sought to pursue a joint MD/PhD with the PhD in computer science. Initially this confused the administration, who viewed this as a strange combination. But in the end, they promised to support Griffin if he was accepted to the computer science PhD program – which, of course, he was.

It sounds like this worked out pretty well – Griffin was pursuing the joint degree and found his way to a staggering number of high-profile early digital projects which included everything from the management of patient-related information for hospitals to digitizing medical school course information for his colleagues. As he neared the end of medical school, wondering what he might do next, he received an offer he couldn’t refuse. If he was willing to forgo additional medical training (such as an internship, residency, etc.), he was told, he could instead go directly to a faculty position at Harvard Medical School, set up a research lab, and also serve as CTO for the medical school. He said yes.

Quickly, Griffin became immersed in a range of interesting projects and collaborations with a particular focus on the challenges associated with extracting useful information from the electronic health record (EHR). Griffin emphasizes that the EHR is fundamentally a record of physicians and other providers interacting with a patient – rather than a comprehensive record of the patients themselves. This can lead, he says, to “weird biases and misunderstandings” – especially when EHR data is analyzed without the relevant contextual understanding of the practice of medicine, including potentially idiosyncrasies associated with the specific care environment.

Griffin has also found a way to cultivate his artistic side through his work, in his data visualizations. For example, this paper, describing the “Triangle of Biomedicine” presents a graphical depiction of how innovations in basic science translate over time to impact clinical medicine, and this paper, offering the “Tapestry of Big Biomedical Data,” a now-famous illustration showing the relationship between different sources of information about a patient’s health. Notably, Griffin’s interest in data visualization places him in distinguished company – including Florence Nightingale, as David recently discussed in his latest Wall Street Journal book review for Tim Harford’s The Data Detective.

We are inspired by all Griffin has done and continues to do at the frontier of technology and health, and we welcome him to Tech Tonics!

This episode of Tech Tonics is sponsored by Manatt Health. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Show Notes:

Matt Wilsey grew up wanting to serve.  He spent his early career in government working for both blue and red administrations, but was eventually lured back to where he grew up–Silicon Valley—to join the tech scene, and helped start and lead several successful tech companies, including Zazzle and CardSpring (sold to Twitter).  Along the way Matt did a stint in the New York financial scene, working for leadership at KKR.   He considered a return to government, but real life, in the form of a child born with a rare disease, intervened.

Today, Matt Wilsey is CEO of Grace Science, a company that has a laser-like focus on curing a genetic disorder known as NGLY1 Deficiency, which affects about 75 people worldwide – it’s a pretty specific job which arose out a pretty specific experience – the desire to cure his own child, Grace.  Despite no training in science or biology and no experience in the pharma world, Matt is driving his company to help all people with NGLY1 find hope for a cure and find each other.  He is hell-bent on helping Grace back to health, on helping others fight this insidious disease, and to contribute to the general advancement of biotech discovery for common diseases along the way.

Matt has teamed up with patients, their families, a global array of academic researchers and even a Nobel laureate to achieve his goal; together they see light at the end of the tunnel.  Matt expects clinical trials of the drug they have collectively developed to begin within two years and to make a difference not just for future children with this disease, but also his own. We are so thrilled to have Matt on Tech Tonics today!

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics.  Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Amy Emerson, CEO of MAPS Public Benefit Corp. (MAPS), grew up in Kodiak, Alaska and fell in love with both animals and science as a child.  Later in life, when considering veterinary school, she realized that she loved biology but hated math – she would rather live in the wilderness on a lake and look upon science as a form of art.

Amy’s path led her to a microbiology lab for fish and game, then to bench science at a biotech company where she learned, as she says it, pre-clinical research is “an exercise in proving yourself wrong.”  She ultimately switched to the clinical side of biotech research and spent years developing drugs the old fashioned way.  For instance, she played a key role in the development of numerous vaccines during a long stint at Chiron starting in its early years.

A chance moment at Burning Man led Amy down a different drug development path.   Through a circuitous series of events, she met Rick Doblin, who was doing foundational clinical research into the use of MDMA (aka Ecstasy) for clinical applications. Rick went on to become founder of MAPS, a company intent on bringing the first FDA approved MDMA product to those who suffer from Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health conditions.

Upon hearing Rick speak, Amy felt “a moment of clarity and purpose.” She made a cold call to Rick, volunteering to help with his clinical and regulatory efforts. Today she is CEO of the company.  We spoke to Amy about her career, but also the burgeoning field of psychedelic drugs for mental health treatment and the issues around legality, stigma and potential convergence with traditional pharma.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics.  Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with its parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Stacy Feld had settled into a satisfying career in biotech business development when she accidentally found her way into a meeting with Genentech’s CEO and a tiny startup company called 23andMe. The moment sparked a sudden realization that the best life science innovation would be focused around the consumer and a career finding ways to make that prediction real.

Raised on a New Hampshire ranch in a town of 1000 where her parents owned the local video store, Stacy’s original career plan was “to get out of New Hampshire.”

After attending college at Penn, Stacy was pointed towards law school, she attended Vanderbilt to study criminal justice, potentially the legacy of the robbery that sent her parents to New Hampshire from New York in the first place.

After a fortuitously-timed internship opportunity at Wilson Sonsini, a leading Silicon Valley firm during the go go days of the 1990’s tech boom, Stacy became a full time lawyer advising startups that included tech and biotech companies, many of which are now household names.  Biotech, in particular, intrigued her, as she was drawn to the way partnerships created value and found herself attracted more to biotech patent licensing than general software licensing.

Stacy eventually left the law firm and went to a startup  – a gene expression company in Madison, WI called 3rd Wave Technology, that was ultimately sold to Hologic.  Afterwards she joined Genentech and led business development around small immunology and autoimmune biomarker companies with a focus  on filling the Genentech pipeline.  Stacy’s Genentech role led her to a fateful breakfast with Linda Avey (co-founder of 23andMe) and subsequently the meeting that drew her attention to consumer-driven healthcare.  It was a pivotal moment that ultimately led her to Physic Ventures, which had consumer products company Unilever as a major backer, and a career refocused on the consumer as healthcare purchaser.

Stacy ultimately joined Johnson & Johnson to lead consumer-focused investing and she now leads J&J Innovation activities in the Western US, Australia and New Zealand. Her passion for supporting the small entrepreneur continues to reflect her own 8-year experience running a catering company off the side of her desk while at Genentech, a conduit for her passion for cooking.

We are delighted to welcome Stacy to today’s show!

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics.  Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

A Jersey girl drawn first captivated by engineering while in college at Dartmouth, Ariel Dowling went on to pursue her PhD at Stanford, exploring the use of wearables to anticipate and prevent knee injuries. After several experiences at tech-focused startups, Ariel has more recently found a home — and a calling — as a digital health leader in biopharma.

Ariel grew up in Basking Ridge, NJ (exit 36 off 78). A good student and a talented lacrosse player, Ariel was strongly drawn to Dartmouth. Once there, she found she loved the community, and especially appreciated their approach to engineering, which she describes as project-based and team oriented; the program was focused, as she explains, on cultivating engineering managers rather than individual contributors.

After completing Dartmouth in four years with two bachelors degrees — she headed off to a PhD in mechanical engineering at Stanford. While the Stanford class was relatively large, she found camaraderie from a group of women engineers who supported and inspired each other.

An avid ultimate frisbee player, Ariel noticed that women seemed to suffer more (non-contact) knee injuries in this sport than men. This ultimately led to her PhD thesis, involving the application of early wearables to injury prevention.

After graduation, Ariel and her husband spent several years in Israel, where she completed a post-doc in robotics. Upon returning to the United States, Ariel’s first job was at a DARPA-funded startup in Boston, which quickly proved to be a decision she regretted. She soon found another job at a fall detection company, and then was poached by an early digital health company, MC-10. This startup stood out to Ariel because it was her first experience at a “really hard-core, VC-backed, growth-focused” company; she took naturally to this environment.

Ultimately, Ariel decided to move on, taking a role in digital health at a biotech company—Cambridge (MA)-based Biogen. She found she enjoyed the challenge, and in short order became (and remains) a much-sought-out thought leader on the digital health speaking circuit. Importantly, Ariel says it was her “keep saying yes” attitude that helped create many of these opportunities.

More recently, Ariel joined Takeda Pharma, also in Cambridge, MA, where she’s a digital strategy leader at the company’s Data Science Institute.

With her combination of vision, expertise, passion, and optimism, Ariel offers an inspiring portrait of the future of digital and data in pharma. We are delighted to welcome her today’s show!

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

A self-described “nerdy” kid from a working class family in a bedroom community of “The City,” on the South Shore of Long Island, Paul Bleicher trained as a physician-scientist, and was heading towards a career in academic medicine when he boldly decided to pivot to industry, where he’s enjoyed a remarkable and storied career in a range of large and small organizations, often very different, but sharing a focus on collecting and using data.

Like David Kessler, Harvey Milk and Stan Lee, our guest, Paul Bleicher grew up in the Five Towns on Long Island, depicted – he points out — in the movie GoodFellas, Thomas Pynchon’s novel, V, and the TV show, Entourage. Paul describes himself as a “late 60’s amalgamation of mathlete and hippie-wannabee with high school-educated parents,” and says he was inspired at a young age by books like Arrowsmith and Microbe Hunters to become a physician-scientist.

Paul studied biology at RPI, attended a transformative summer program in cell physiology at Wood’s Hole, and ultimately was accepted into the MD/PhD program at the University of Rochester, where he pursued his PhD in immunology, and on the medical side, learned about George Engel’s biopsychosocial model of illness, emphasizing the importance of social and environmental factors as well as genetic and biological.

In Boston, at Harvard Medical School, Paul continued his training via a residency in internal medicine then specializing in dermatology, and pursued a post-doc in molecular immunology. This research resulted in a number of high-profile publications, and a plum job as a physician-scientist at MGH.

After a few years on the HMS faculty, Paul took his career in a bold new direction. Inspired in part by his scientist-wife, who had joined one of the earliest immunology-focused biotech startups in Boston, Paul was motivated to pursue his interest in translation in the private sector, and gained valuable experience first at an early CRO, and then at an early-stage biotech.

He then founded an innovative pharma IT company called Phase Forward, and began a thirteen year journey with the company, which was ultimately acquired by Oracle. Paul then joined an early stage innovative health data company, Humedica, which was acquired by Optum, part of the UnitedHealth Group (as David discussed here) in 2013. Paul stayed on at Optum for six years, serving for most of that time as the founding CEO of the analytics and innovation collaborative OptumLabs, until spring 2020.

Paul attributes his success to his “hands on” approach, able to understand both the overarching aims and the underlying details. He is an inventor on six issued patents on health and pharma IT inventions, and initiated a numbers of major projects in area like deep learning, network analysis, machine learning, etc., typically contributing his own R code.

An éminence grise at the intersection of pharma and data, Paul advises numerous companies and investors and serves on a number of boards. We are delighted to welcome him to our show today!

Dr. Sally Shaywitz – Yes, she is David’s mom – has brought an entrepreneur’s mindset to her life’s work in dyslexia, recognizing the condition as a prevalent and underappreciated need, then working tirelessly to advance the science and enact the policy required to fully unlock the potential within so many brilliant individuals.  Sally has helped a huge array of individuals access what she has famously termed their “sea of strengths”.

The daughter of two immigrants who had escaped Eastern Europe at the turn of the century and arrived in America in search of a better life, Sally was born and grew up up in the Bronx, New York. The family wasn’t well-off: her father was a dressmaker, her mom, a homemaker. Yet she describes her childhood, with her parents and older sister, Irene, as “overflowing with love.”

Sally attended college at the City College of New York (CCNY), and after initially contemplating a career in law, found herself drawn to medicine, and was accepted early into the medical school of her choice, Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Tragically, the same year, Sally’s mom was afflicted with endometrial cancer, and despite what initially seemed like an encouraging prognosis, she grew progressively ill and ultimately passed away, a particularly devastating experience given the family’s especially close emotional bonds.

While entering medical school with a heavy heart, Sally soon found she resonated with what she describes as the humanity and warmth of medicine; she was especially drawn to pediatrics, pursuing it herself and marrying a pediatrician, Bennett Shaywitz, she met the summer after her first year of medical school.

While Sally was one of only four women in a class of 100, she generally found the men to be far friendlier; similarly, during her pediatrics training. When she wanted to organize her schedule so she could take time off to be with her first child, it was her female colleagues, she said, who resisted and rejected the idea.

After completing her training in pediatrics and a fellowship in developmental pediatrics, Sally and her family – now with three children – moved to Dayton, OH, where her husband had been assigned by the Air Force to run a research center during the Vietnam War. Sally decided she wanted to focus on her children, and put her career on hold. She loved the experience, and wrote about it for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, focusing on the contrast between, as she describes it, what “enlightened women” were taught about motherhood and how, in her experience, it was so much more instinctive, positive and fulfilling.

The family subsequently relocated to suburban Connecticut after Bennett accepted a position at Yale Medical School. Sally says she initially planned to be a stay-at-home mom, but found the available social environment intellectually deadening. She began to see patients out of her home – an experience she wrote up for Ms. Magazine – and was soon recruited by Yale to care for the learning disorder patients that apparently no one else was interested in seeing. The field was viewed at the time as a bit of a backwater (the starting point of so many entrepreneurial journeys!), but Sally found she really enjoyed taking care of patients with dyslexia, and was determined to drive their care forward. This mission would come to define Sally’s career (and soon, Bennett’s as well, as they began to work as a team), starting with a transformative longitudinal study (now in its 37th year, and counting!) that evolved into an extensive clinical research program. Their research revealed that dyslexia was surprisingly common – affecting about 20% of the population – and that it doesn’t spontaneously regress with age.

Sally developed what’s now commonly called the “sea of strengths” model, which describes dyslexia as a localized deficit in the way language is processed, so reading takes longer. It is a problem often seen in children with tremendous strengths; thus, it becomes particularly important to evaluate dyslexics on what they do know – their reasoning ability, say – and not to mistakenly undervalue their potential simply because they are slow readers. Accommodations such as additional time for tests can prove transformative in allowing a dyslexic’s intrinsic ability to be revealed and meaningfully assessed.

As a consequence of impact of this research, Sally and Bennett achieved exceptional academic success – both are endowed professors at Yale Medical School, elected members of the National Academy of Medicine, and have led many NIH grants and program projects. Yet – like many entrepreneurs — they were also determined to drive the science into palpable change, in this case for dyslexic students and their families. Together they co-founded the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity and have relentlessly focused not only on advancing the research, but also on ensuring the knowledge finds expression in public policy.  They frequently testify before Congress and state legislatures, for example.

In 2003, Sally summarized her learnings in her best-selling book, Overcoming Dyslexia; earlier this year, she released a completely-revised and updated second edition, which has been similarly well-received.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Show Notes:

“Catch-22 For Mothers” – by Sally Shaywitz, New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 4, 1973

Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity (YCDC)

“Success Stories” – profiles of exceptional dyslexics, from YCDC site

“The Couple Who Helped Decode Dyslexia” by Katie Hafner, New York Times, September 21, 2018

“Test Early To Detect Dyslexia – Our Children Deserve Nothing Less” by Ruben Navarrette Jr., Washington Post Writer’s Group (syndicated column, October 2020).

Overcoming Dyslexia, 2nd Edition (Knopf, 2020)

About the Yale Dyslexia panel – 2015 – featuring Ari Emanuel, Diane Swonk, Brian Grazer, Toby Cosgrove, David Boies, with remarks by Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA), and by Valerie Jarrett.

Matthew Zachary, CEO of Offscrip Media  has had multiple careers despite the fact that he shouldn’t have had any.  He had studied to be a concert pianist and composer and conductor through college, but at the age of 21, on his way to study in a USC graduate music program with Hans Zimmer, he was diagnosed with a rare brain cancer and told he had 6 months to live.  That was in 1995.

Matthew credits his uncle, a geneticist, with saving his life, serving as his medical “Sherpa” and helping him “having the chutzpah to challenge established treatment.”  But his healthcare experience, and especially the 6 years it took to recover his immune system post-treatment, made clear to him that young patients weren’t getting the information they needed nor the support required to thrive after a medical crisis.

Matthew had a thriving media career when a chance meeting of another recovered patient who had the same brain cancer led him to realize that there was a vast gap between patients’ need for knowledge and community and the system’s ability to deliver it. He founded Stupid Cancer in 2006 to help fill this gap, focused especially on helping young people who had survived cancer and were seeking to live out life as normally as possible.  During the 12 years he led the organization, every health tech company focused on cancer knocked on Matthew’s door; it led him to the realization that entrepreneurs, by and large, just don’t understand how to build for or reach the right people to ensure their offering makes sense.

Matthew has a special beef with how Silicon Valley thinks about healthcare, feeling that the culture leads to building the wrong things for the wrong people. And he further thinks that venture investors don’t care enough to invest in the right things most of the time.  As such, Matthew is firm believer in the essential role of peer to peer care and the importance of life hacks, especially when the traditional delivery system doesn’t provide the answers. It is his view that for-profit companies can’t address cancer in an interesting way unless it stops being profit driven, though he recognizes the limitations of the not-for-profit sector as well.

Join us for this fun show where we talk to Matthew about his long career in and around healthtech and media – he had the first healthcare-related radio show and interviewed 2000 people over 14 years.  He was also the first speaker (and piano player) at the inaugural Health2.0 Conference.  We talk to him about what it’s like to see healthtech having its moment, what led to the formation of Stupid Cancer and what it was like to turn the organization over to others, and his new initiative, OffScrip Media, which has reconnected him with his love of being behind the microphone and which is billed as, “a podcast that calls out all sorts of stupid BS in healthcare through raw conversations about advocacy, heroism, and the audacity of health.”

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics.  Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips  the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Show Notes:

Kevin Lyman was once the world’s highest ranked Warlock in Worlds of Warcraft and a professional Halo2 player. But that wasn’t his original plan. In fact, growing up in New Jersey, Kevin always wanted to be a scientist, even before he was sure of what that meant.

While a student at Renselaer Polytechnic, Kevin took a number of jobs, including toy designer at Hasbro, sensor designer on the Falcon rocket for SpaceX and on the Excel team at Microsoft. But it was his first full time job as an engineer at Enlitic in 2015 that made him realize he wanted to apply his scientific ingenuity to healthcare, a field that he views as one of the few where you can help do something that really helps people.

Enlitic took a number oof twists and turns as it built its imaging analytics products, and when those roads came back together as a result of his leadership, Kevin became the CEO in 2018. Kevin talks about what it’s like to be an under-30 CEO, the good and the bad of AI, and how one effectively balances intuition with the logical model inherent in an AI-focused company. He also talks about his current creative outlet – drawing – a sample of which you can see in evidence behind him in his photo.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with its parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.