Technology for Good: Innovation Challenge Kickoff
welcome i'm terry kramer i'm the faculty director of the easton technology management center here at ucla anderson and i'd like to welcome you to this event technology for good cross campus innovation challenge now we've got two objectives for the program tonight the first is to let you know about the program parameters and objectives of what is our third annual cross-campus innovation challenge our second goal for tonight's program is to have a discussion with two industry luminaries regarding innovation opportunities and key success factors in two areas health care and sustainability those are the two areas of focus for what will be our innovation challenge now let me talk just a little bit about those two areas as a bit of context first of all to start out with healthcare healthcare in the us represents the largest sector in the largest economy in the world but its benefits are far from evenly distributed improvements in affordability and access to care together with better health outcomes and care delivery represent critical challenges in achieving efficient effective and equitable care for all americans second item is on sustainability again some context the world is now on track to exceed three degrees fahrenheit of warming by the turn of the century so in less than 80 years the current pace of progress needs to improve dramatically for the world to limit the worst impacts of climate change now while care and sustainability may seem very very different they're actually very much tied in a recent statement published by the new england journal of medicine physicians were calling for the rapidly warming climate as the greatest threat to global public health and urged world leaders to cut heat trapping emissions to avoid catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse so with that context let me share my screen and i want to tell you a little bit about our innovation challenge and our innovation challenge is one of the kind of marquee events that we've got at the easton center that is across campus to really start thinking about technology based innovation that can address large societal needs so in terms of the objectives of the innovation challenge there are two of them the first one is to take all of the great resources and talent that we have across campus at ucla to identify innovation opportunities which affect notable societal areas of need the second goal is the sustainability goal is to create a set of learnings from this innovation challenge about technology-based innovation that can help future students and help future entrepreneurs we're going to have two tracks this year for the innovation challenge first one is on health care and that is to create solutions that significantly improve accessibility affordability health outcomes or care delivery in the u.s on the sustainability front the prompt that we have here is to create a sustainable solution that will improve water energy food agriculture transportation and or ecosystems now as i mentioned this is designed to be a cross-campus effort so all ucla students fellows and post docs are eligible to participate and all the teams have to have at least one mba and one non-mba and as many of you know the best areas of innovation are interdisciplinary in nature so getting diverse teams are going to help hugely terms of the criteria that our judges will use in this innovation challenge there are four of them first one is impact we're looking for large transformative ideas that have both depth and breadth of value both to the venture and to society second evaluation criteria is feasibility so notwithstanding what i just said in the first about impact you've got to identify areas of innovation that can be executed on so that ability to identify how do you execute what are the paths to execution how do you think about metrics of success will be part of feasibility third area of evaluation is going to be on innovation itself we're looking for original ideas powerful ideas and ideas that are differentiated in nature and then the fourth and final criteria is persuasion as all good leaders and entrepreneurs have to do you've got to be persuasive persuasive with customers to try out new products and services persuasive to investors to be able to raise capital persuasive in thinking about public stakeholders whether that be governments regulated officials community leaders etc so that ability to be persuasive in both written in oral form will be the fourth criteria now in terms of the calendar that will lead up to the final innovation challenge presentations in the fall we'll have a series of events that the easton center will put on that will help prepare anybody who's thinking about entering the innovation challenge or people that have already decided to do that in a lot of the critical areas of need so tonight's event is going to be the kickoff event which i hope you'll find from our two lead speakers here a lot of ideas about where the biggest opportunities might be where innovation might reside and how you might win a second area is a series of workshops financial modeling workshops on october 13th a product management workshop on november 2nd a pitching workshop on november 3rd and then a team formation workshop on november 17th so all of these kind of preparatory workshops are literally going to be held in the next few weeks and then when we enter the winter there'll be team registration team registrations will open on january 3rd the deadline will be on february 4th and then literally just two weeks later business plan submissions will be due on february 18th we'll then have a series of judges review the business plans for announcements of finalists that'll occur on march 18th and then we'll have a series of industry advisory programs so people from industry to help give advice to the teams that submit and that will occur from march 21st first to april 15th main message on this is think of your ideas early because there's actually not that long a window to develop a business plan we'll then in the spring have final round presentations from the finalist teams those will be held on april 22nd and april 29th winners will be announced a few days later and then we'll do a debrief event where we'll share the types of ideas that came up and then the finalists the winners that came up to benefit the broader ucla community so if you need more info on the innovation challenge you'll see a variety of contacts here our website that provides more information our slack channel and most importantly jamie park jamie works in our easton center and she is a program manager for the innovation challenge so this as i mentioned is the third annual event jamie is very knowledgeable about all the ins and the outs and the deliverables and what success looks like etc so feel free to contact her her email address is listed there final point is i just want to thank our sponsors and i want to thank our sponsors not just for providing financial support and other support to this but the fact that we are growing across campus set of relationships as i mentioned the outset the real magic of this is to make this interdisciplinary so we've got four sponsors here ucla health the anderson school of management with our dean tony bernardo who has earmarked funds to support this the ucla sustainable la grand challenge and then the institute for carbon management a thank you to all four of them for everything that they're uh that they're doing so let me now switch over here and uh share a few thoughts about our uh speaker and our speaker our moderator is a terrific moderator who's a colleague of uh of mine and has just done a lot of great things she's anderson's very own adjunct assistant professor gail northrup a little bit about her background she's a consultant she's a coach she's an educator she's a president of northrop nonprofit consulting she teaches social entrepreneurship governance and impact at ucla anderson and she helped launch impact at anderson which is an initiative and a center at anderson that's really responsible for coordinating all of our activities regarding impact at the school she's also an adjunct professor at the university of cape town uh the graduate school of business there she works with the bertha center for social innovation and entrepreneurship she uh has co-founded as a former associate director of spark health africa which is a non-profit assisting governments in africa to strengthen their health care systems and improve health care outcomes including the elimination of mother-to-child transmission of hiv her consulting firm has served numerous uh important and prestigious social impact organizations including human rights watch the aclu of southern california liberty hill foundation homeboy industries and more she received her mba from ucla anderson and her bachelor's degree from stanford serves on a number of boards including the pediatric and adolescent aids treatment for africa spark health africa and ucla's global lab for research in action so let me just take a moment again and just say a huge thank you to gail and turn it over to uh to you thank you terry and welcome to everybody for joining us today we're really excited about this event and the challenge and i'm excited to spend some time with our two panelists that you'll get to know over the course of the next hour and i'm excited to be in conversation with harlan levine and matt koslov so before that i just want to talk a little bit about today's event and build on what terry has just shared with you today's event really aims to highlight the key trends in leadership today the transformative effects of technology across all sectors the imperative for interdisciplinary collaboration and the critical need for businesses of all types to be serving society it's an important leadership call to action to deeply understand some of society's greatest problems to identify potential solutions to resource organizations and initiatives appropriately and ultimately to lead in a way that creates value for all stakeholders stakeholders not just shareholders stakeholders including customers employees society and even the environment so today's event will also be an opportunity to exemplify the spirit of collective effort which is essential to success an invaluable partnership between the anderson school and the greater ucla campus our many students faculty and alumni who are committed to innovation and advancements in health care and sustainability and most importantly also to be looking at our partnership with the broader community as we seek to listen to to learn from and to engage people who are experiencing the challenges that we're seeking to solve through the innovation challenge so we're very fortunate to have our two panelists with us today harlem levine and matt koslov first a little bit about their backgrounds harlan is the president of strategy and business ventures at city of hope where he's responsible for strategy innovation and growth drug commercialization payer strategies and the center for internal medicine prior to city of hope harlan held executive roles at united health group towers watson and anthem inc he serves on the board as the board chair of access hope city of hope's wholly owned subsidiary focused on serving the employer market and making leading edge cancer care available to all regardless of geography thank you yeah i have a little more about you harlan a little bit more to highlight he serves as a board member for active life scientific bioscience la and keck graduate institute board of trustees he received his ba from harvard college and his md from ucsf welcome to harlan great to be here thank you thanks and matt koslov he has worked across a variety of industries entertainment mobile uh mobile gaming cyber security healthcare aerospace he's currently the managing director of techstars la many of you are probably familiar with techstars one of the top venture accelerators in the country he was the founding managing director of the cedar sinai healthcare accelerator in partnership with techstars and the founding managing director of techstars space accelerator prior to joining techstars matt was head of corporate development at telesign a leading anti-fraud firm and one of la's fastest growing tech companies he's also worked at sony music entertainment as the vp of web and mobile products at yahoo in corporate strategy and product development at it and at bain and company matt has a ba in economics also from harvard and welcome to matt sure so about today's uh format for the session i'm going to be asking harlan and matt a series of questions to hear some of their insights and reflections and recommendations and really tap into their expertise of sitting at the intersection of technology innovation healthcare and sustainability then we're going to use slido uh for moderated q a so the slido event code will be put in the chat it's innovation 21. i'll remind you of that later on um but first let's just jump into conversation with with harlan and matt i've got a couple of questions i'm going to start with you matt um you have had extensive experience as an investor and as a mentor to a lot of different companies that have gone through various accelerators you've been involved in you've invested in over 60 rapidly growing tech companies directly can you just tell us a little bit about the breadth of tech star las focus what are some of the themes you're seeing in terms of areas of innovation and we'd be interested to hear what you personally think what are some of the key elements to successful innovation quite a few questions there so i'll try to remember them all at techstarzla um we're a generalist program so we're investing in the best companies that apply to our program regardless of industry however we try to invest in sectors where our mentor pool as well as the corporate and non-profit landscape in la can best support the companies we decide to invest in and so in la that means we've made healthcare a very strong focus we have some of the leading academic health systems in the world in our backyard we have some of the best pharmaceutical companies in our backyard and so healthcare has always been a very strong focus for us i think we've invested in at least 40 to 50 health tech companies through our la programs and that's just to date but we're also investing in property tech e-commerce and retail related technologies we are investing in sustainability related technologies a lot of aerospace and defense related companies as well given the cluster of aerospace defense corporate civil and military organizations in our backyard but we are trying to really invest in the best companies that we see we're investing in about 25 companies a year at this point across a variety of industries and i forgot what your second question was already i'm sorry no it's good i mean that's a good breadth of all the different investments that you've made and obviously touches on your unique vantage point being here in l.a what are some of the the trends that you're seeing um or themes across some of the investments that you're that you're either considering or that you're actually um moving forward in your process we are when assessing the companies we decide to invest in the number one attribute we're looking at is the quality of the team and we you know assess the team across a variety of dimensions but number one we're looking for founder market fit is this a founder that really understands and is passionate about the problem they're not solving their problem they're solving not just the technology that they're building we want to see that they're obsessive about solving a particular pain point in the market that they understand and have a particular passion for because as anybody who's ever been an entrepreneur it's really hard and that passion has got to be the thing that gets them through those dark nights we also want to see some traction and ability to execute um so in terms of you know how we invest as a firm we are aggressively evaluating the quality of the team um and just speaking around trends i mean we could pick apart different industries and different trends and we'll probably spend a lot of time talking about trends in healthcare i can say that macroeconomically right now the venture market is very hot there's a lot of access to capital valuations are higher than i've ever seen them there's more money flowing through the system than i've ever seen before there are ipos that are becoming great sources of liquidity that then trickle down and funnel the next source of growth for founders who then you know are looking to access capital from that and so it's creating a very virtuous cycle right now which is really exciting um you know i've been in tech for a long time i don't think i've ever seen it this this enthusiastic is the best word i guess i could use well good i love your one of your key points there matt um and i've heard it before particularly when it comes to social innovation which is falling in love with the problem not your solution and being married to that problem through all the iterations that it takes and and that's what we see in terms of successful entrepreneurs is that grit and resilience when when they're hit with different challenges to stay connected to the problem they're trying to solve and i think that's really relevant for for those that are looking at the innovation challenge so um so matt you've worked across a broad range of industries and both in deep tech and health care um and i had to actually look up deep tech to make sure i knew what that meant i i thought i knew it but uh so so for those of you that might not be familiar with that term it's it's a type of organization but most often a type of startup that focuses on tech solutions based on significant scientific or engineering challenges is that about right that's about right you know if you've got at least one phd on the founding team you're probably a deep tech company if you're going through fda approvals you might be a deep tech company if you're putting something into outer space or working in the semiconductor industry you're probably a deep tech company and capital requirements are probably different but on the flip side grant opportunities are a significant opportunity so um we've spent a lot of time finding great founders who are solving really hard problems that there may be a significant mode around but if they are able to cross that chasm not only is it going to make a huge marker on the world but there's probably going to be a big financial opportunity on the other end as well yeah so tell us a little bit more about some of the greatest you know if you see there are certain segments or sub sectors within the health care industry that have great opportunities for technology innovation or technology solutions so i have focused all of my health care investments to date on software and class 1 and class 2 medical devices so i bet harlan will actually be able to speak to some of the more advanced deep tech developments in precision medicine genetic um you know modifications crispr cast 9 type stuff that i can only begin to understand given my understanding of scientific state of the art however there are some pretty incredible developments in in hardware and software that are enabling new business models and new paradigms of of care um that i've been fortunate enough to to work with and one company that i get very excited about is a company called tasso tasso is a company that's spun out of university of wisconsin group of phds with some grant funding from darpa as well as from the university built a device that can sit on your upper arm without any phlebotomist they can use microfluidics to extract enough whole blood to be able to run a pretty wide array of diagnostic tests and as if as as any of you who are following the whole um theranose scandal it's really hard to actually extract and preserve the integrity of whole blood and theranus was not able to do it they said they could do it but they were actually destroying the sample in the process of collecting it but tasso has figured out how to do that and they've created an end-to-end blood analysis capability that does not require a phlebotomist or a trip to the lab which to me is so exciting for a number of reasons one is it enables clinical trials at the edge no longer do you have to get a patient into a doctor's office on a regular basis to collect blood which is usually something that needs to happen quite often as part of a clinical trial so you can democratize access to clinical trials um pediatric applications become really exciting i don't know if any of you are parents um who have ever had to unfortunately get you know quantities of blood from from your young children it's it's not pleasant and to take some of the pain and scariness away from blood draw um is you know is is very comforting um military there are enormous applications you can take an entire um you know an entire naval ship's worth of blood samples on a regular basis i'm using this technology you can create the ability to put labs in safe places and get the blood drawn in in more contentious areas but but frankly the amount of data that's available to uh to us in in blood is enormous and so what the spit test did for genetics you know imagine the the amount of data that you can extract from from blood and being able to get that on a regular basis and so that's a company that doesn't you know you can't just put that to market in a year and hope it takes off it's something that requires a lot of science a lot of clinical trials a lot of nuanced understanding of the market and that company has been you know very effective i could go i could name a whole bunch more if it would be of interest but give us one more example maybe yeah one more that might not seem as deep tech but they've been um rigorously collecting evidence for years to to demonstrate the efficacy of their digital therapeutic is a company we invested in called applied vr actually here in los angeles and they are using virtual reality to manage stress pain and anxiety before during and after surgeries as well as to manage chronic conditions reduce opioid dependencies um they are rolling this out in um obg's and actually people are giving birth with these on and it is wildly fascinating to me how effective virtual reality can be in hijacking the the the brain uh and to think into tricking you into you're somewhere else experiencing somewhere else and they did submit and receive a breakthrough designation earlier this year from the fda which opens a lot of commercial opportunities for them they've raised about 30 million dollars so far and it's uh you know it's a technology that really was in infancy 20 30 years ago 10 years ago and only recently in the last few years has gotten to a state where it's it's real enough and compelling enough that it can have clinical efficacy and there have been a lot of trials and you know i've been really impressed to see the results of um not just on an individual patient basis but across the longitude great examples um i i think of of some of the underlying challenges that you're speaking to in terms of these tech solutions have to do with challenges in as you say democratizing access whether that's to clinical trials or to um effective diagnostics i'd love to turn it to you now harlan and ask kind of the similar question what do you see as some of the greatest challenges health care challenges that either haven't been addressed yet or areas where you see greatest great potential for technology in the healthcare space you're happy to jump in on that i just want to touch on something matt said about the applied virtual reality because i saw the company years ago and and they clearly have made a lot of progress but this is going to be a common theme that i'm going to talk about today it's what what matt was talking about was the really cool stuff which is you while you're having the procedure you can separate yourself from the procedure but i think you're somewhere else but it's initial impact on people it's just asking people what gives you anxiety about these things and it's the unknown so what the that company and others can also do is take you through the experience that you would otherwise have no way of knowing knowing what it's like to walk into a hospital walk into a procedure room whether it's getting pain management with a needle in your back or radiation therapy it takes the mystery out of it and that's really when you talk to human beings that's what they want they want they want the known as opposed to the unknown because most people can handle the known so the theme is and i'm picking up something terry said about wanting original ideas it's also original ideas and how you apply them in original ways and i hope we can hit on that a few times during during the evening today to answer your question you know healthcare is so broad and we have such amazing acceleration of data and technology and capabilities and understanding the genome and problems across the country and as cobit is pointing out which we already should have known global health care issues there really is no single answer to like what are the biggest issues things are getting addressed but i think with the new technology and data i'm going to talk about things that are being under attended to or there's huge opportunities still ahead um so i'll start with um in fact matt kind of outlined my you know where i should go and i'm going to follow that lead for a while um you know the the the opportunities are so big with a new understanding of the human genome i mean this is something that it has advanced immensely in 20 years and it's not just understanding dna it's the the the volume of data that's being generated from that is going to lead to immense opportunities like in new drugs gene therapies but we'll talk a little bit later about the impact it can have on what we do today as well so i say the human genome is a there's a ton of interest going into it there's more money going into that than i've seen even if i go back maybe five to six years i think you can add a zero on to the valuation of some of these companies that are very early stage so there's huge opportunity with human genome the the second area that i think there's huge opportunity is addressing areas of healthcare that are lacking data and analytics today and applying the new capabilities we have in high-speed computing and the better analytics that we have and really addressing problems that we've never been a bit addressed before so i'll try to keep it simple can we take a population of people and better predict who's going to get sick and what they're going to get sick from so we can mitigate it we do that already with less sophisticated ways for things like heart failure we're trying to predict which diabetics will become more serious over a short period of time um but you know think about the current problems we have now with the covet pandemic if we could tell who uh was going to present in the er and was safe to go home and who had to go in the hospital think about the impact it would have in capacity in the hospital that we have and there's so many other examples of better uh and more efficient use of of the resources we have if we can predict short-term complications like who's going to get septic or just who's going to get sick in the long term maybe we'll touch on it later today we can now predict or identify people who have cancer just at the beginning stages before they have any manifestations and think about the opportunities to intervene there i do think one of the really under attended opportunities is to understand um how do we improve access to health care across the world how do we drive more equity and affordability um and improving really the health of our population and quite frankly when we can do that in the united states how do we do that and take it on globally and i'm not suggesting that's the sequence and a priority but i think we have such opportunities to learn here on how to improve access and you know how to make uh how to understand the social determinants of health and what really limits people from getting the care that they need it's you know there's cultural barriers but there's really just distance to food there's distance to access um i hope to have some time to talk about behavioral health at some point we have to disrupt the way we go about these things i'll plant the seed on behavioral health right now which is um i heard this in npr years ago in zimbabwe they had i think about 15 million people in the community with 15 psychiatrists and they needed to do something to and you know that they have stress just like we have stress and someone came up with the idea and said who's one of the most trusted individuals in in the in the culture and it was the grandparent so they actually trained grandmothers to do some basic uh behavioral health stability um interventions and listening and they put them on bus stops across the key areas in zimbabwe and you can't imagine the utilization that these people that that those grandmothers had and the impact it had and it became the social norm by the way to stop by and do one of those bus stop visits to a grandmother people just need to be heard they need simple tools and without technology they were able to solve a problem by thinking reinventing the role and thinking about what was really needed now imagine if you can apply technology to that how you can magnify the the impact of having those new trained roles now be accessible to everyone even people that can't afford to get into the city to get to the bus stop we need to think creatively like that and those are the opportunities that i think are under attended at the current time such a great example harlan it reminds me of my work in africa around mother to child transmission of hiv and the use of a new cadre of workers which i think has been one of the most impactful social innovations around hiv is is the idea of hiv positive mothers walking alongside those other mothers who are pregnant to make sure that they get tested to make sure that they go on treatment to make sure that they stay on treatment and that their child receives treatment so they they deliver hiv free babies and and that was the social innovation that happened because of humans connecting with humans in a way that hadn't been formalized before and later became codified in in the system in the healthcare system yeah you know it takes so long to formalize that and sometimes we get ahead on the technology and then we don't have the either the regulatory environment or we just have impediments because people don't want to change what they do today whether it's the healthcare providers or the payers they want to pay for what they pay for and they want to use the roles that they have you know you think about all sorts of remote patient monitoring and again hope to hit on that but you know the the remote patient monitoring is good for solving the issues that we know today but think about what you can do out of the home now if you have remote patient monitoring but we have a shortage of nurses already so how do we deal with that well what if we think ahead of here's where it's going does it have to be a nurse that goes in and checks on the patient you know we have not that i'm necessarily touting the success of it but we have neighborhood watch programs why can't we have community health watch programs where we know people are going into the home to get their care they're leaving the hospital sooner let's set up like a social network where either by phone by video by by computer or by visit people will just lay people with basic training can make lay eyeballs on someone to make sure they're safe to get to the bathroom to get food to make sure their monitors are working you know we just need to create a new network to support the technology and i think your example is a really good one but i think it's going to be explosive as we we we try to move more care to the home we can't rely on the same roles of nurses nurse practitioners and pas i think it's interesting you say that too and i'll just connect it when we think of cross-campus collaboration ucla anderson just this week launched a new program a management training program for community health advocates community health workers and managers of community health workers recognizing the power particularly during covet of those folks that are on the front lines of health care delivery um and their role in ensuring better access as well as better outcomes so um exciting to see that actually get launched this week yeah i mean i i think we have to do that because we just don't we have a shortage of the the skilled people and we have people working below um you know their training level i mean i hope we don't call it like defund the nurses at any point along the way i mean it's really enhancing the nurses enhancing the doctors and you know we just got a grant or an earmark for a community van to go out in an underserved area we're stepping back to say how can we use technology to have as few possible as of nurses and doctors in the vans and put new people that can address other community issues that you know have been ignored in the social determinants of health the cultural you know the need to look like the community you're serving so it is a combination of original ideas and technology that that will solve many of our health care issues but the high-tech stuff we will always exceed excel at it's the fact that you know we're i don't remember the number but yeah we're in the 40s or 50s in terms of our our you know our ranking in the commonwealth fund of of healthcare systems we have to do a better job of meeting that lower end of the underserved communities that we don't do today well let's build on that point you know talking about um you touched on harlan both kind of unattended and maybe even over-hyped technology solutions i'm curious matt if you have any examples or any points you'd like to share in terms of where you see um gaps in terms of healthcare innovation or areas that you think are being you know overly touted and really we have to go to simpler solutions with more creative execution let's say i mean from where i sit right now and but i just wanted to go revisit a point harlan made because it reminded me of two companies in our portfolio um both addressing the elder care nursing caregiver shortage one is a company we invested in called helper bees and they are using you know young college-age students and you know recent grads to pay them to go help out elderly people in their neighborhood and there's a similar company called neighbor force that's doing something relatively similar and it doesn't require a lot of deep tech to do that it's you know there are people who want to be helpful and can be and can be trained to be useful without necessarily needing the medical background so i thought that was an interesting touch point and some trends we've been seeing um and and sometimes the technology does not need to be let me back up i still think that we're really very much in the infancy of using technology to improve healthcare um you know some people call it health 1.0 2.0 3.0 i don't know where we are exactly in the life cycle um but a lot of the systems that are still being used in day-to-day operations of um of health systems and interacting with patients are still very like old-fashioned like they're broken processes they're outdated systems that looked like they were developed in the late 90s early 2000s and don't really look like the patient experiences or consumer experiences you'd expect to have in 2021 and sometimes sometimes it can be as simple as using text messaging to communicate with patients around their upcoming visits and something as simple as that can actually become a multi-billion dollar business um because the status quo before that was using email or using the epic or cerner app and pushing a notification that the patient ever sees but guess what the response rate on text message is nearly 100 and so one of our companies well health you know saw that as an opportunity and has built a you know several hundred person company worth hundreds of millions of dollars based on creating a better patient communication experience and so i think when when the people who are on on the call today are thinking around innovation challenges think about it as a patient think about some of the things that just there's a gap between your experience when you go to a restaurant or to a mechanic and when you go visit your doctor and sometimes it's easier said than done if you look at how artificial intelligence is being applied in certain sectors and we're still very much in the infancy of using ai in healthcare and that doesn't necessarily mean using computer vision to you know detect um cancer tumors on on and radiate radiology it can be something as simple as looking at the text in your health record and helping the doctor create the note they're going to spend half their time writing up i can be helping find the clinical trial that you you might qualify for because in in the past it was someone manually looking through all the requirements of all the different clinical trials and matching them up manually by hand so there are lots of technologies we mentioned virtual reality and you know every year there's a whole new tech cycle that introduces new technologies and then thinking through how can you apply them to healthcare and again think through what is the problem you're trying to solve not just what is the technology you want to use there's just enormous opportunity um arlen tell us a little bit about some of the promising areas of innovation going on specifically at city of hope i know you have a lot of cutting-edge innovations share with us a few of the ones that you get most excited about yeah let me um i'll jump in with some of the tech ones and then we'll get to some of the service stuff um so with technology gotta start with the human genome we've done so much research in that area and and with the data that's generated let me just tell you what it does i mean it allows you to take high-risk cases and understand who has you know what their prognosis is so you could take two people with colon cancer and be able to help them plan their lives to tell them you know which which is the more aggressive case as i mentioned earlier you can identify cancer patients now by circulating dna um not waiting for them to you know to to show up in an organ importantly think about all the women that have surgery had their breast cancer removed and we're not sure if they have anything left in their body or not we have now testing for what we call minimal residual disease and aside from learning how to treat that over time think about the comfort it can give people families to know that it appears that they don't have residual disease left we also can use a person's dna we can reprogram a person's t cells and by reprogramming their dna so it actually attacks cancer cells and only cancer cells so it um has less damage to surrounding tissue or any other tissue and also in many cases particularly blood cancers can give you sustained remissions and we're building off of that and those are called car t cells and next up are going to be nk cells and then bites and what's nice about that is they get more specific but also safer over time and you can use them as an outpatient and hopefully um in a clinic and then people can go home and not have to be hospitalized um the next step beyond that will be what everyone hears about is gene therapy and regenerative medicine and i won't go deep in that but in regenerative medicine we basically take stem cells that are the cells that are undifferentiated when you're born and they become all your different organs but we can now reprogram them so if you need to replace heart fibers for heart failure or something in the spinal cord you can the hope is to be able to restore function that we haven't been able to do so far we already have treatments for blindness and you know the field will continue to evolve it's going to get expensive but then the price will come down so we'll have you know we'll have to figure that out as a society a little bit less scientific i talked about monitoring already think about what that allows people to do is get out of the hospital sooner it's safer to be at home you know you have what we call nosocomial infections where you get infected by the bacteria in the hospital it's highly resistant so you're improving health but also you're improving affordability and it's safety and then robotic surgery uh you know we city of hope did not invent robotic surgery but one of the first systems to embrace it in fact i think we had the highest volume in the world for a while before we start educating others in the area but you can get at things that you couldn't get at before you know prostate cancer is one where it was it came to be and you know less bleeding and and we think less um side effects and you know cutting nerves and things but you know in in metastatic liver cancer we can take out eight or nine metastases in the liver that would come from the colon where up until doing that people it was a death sentence to have colon cancer spread to the liver and now you have not not a prolongation of life but but a cure in 35 to 40 of patients so it's really remarkable um what we can do both with technology remote monitoring and then the human genome and the data that comes from there i want to just kind of stay on that theme of uh creativity of someone else's idea i remember as a kid i'm going to say a really young kid but i think i may have been in college and there's an article in the la times about dolly the sheep and if you're old enough to remember that you're my age or at least well you're you're my age or close but i think i was in the fourth grade when that came in with that i was not in the fourth grade you know matt matt this was really friendly conversations with this comment exactly i'm gonna say you're you're still spitting up at that age but we'll move on from there but but you know one of the scientists at city of hope saw that and he said well if you take dna and put it in an egg and make a clone of a sheep called dolly um why can't i take dna that makes human insulin put it into bacteria that can make human insulin at scale so up until then people were always taking animal insulin and he basically took an idea that was you know used for fun for a sheep and put it to good use to solve a problem that he identified and with that that intellectual property we licensed it to genentech and two things happened one was human insulin came to be and the second thing was 41 years ago maybe close to 42 the entire biotech industry was born out of that license and out of genetech's vision and this doctor's ingenuity to take something that people were using for other reasons and and bring it to human benefit so um you know and the human benefit is people had allergic responses to the animal stuff and it didn't work um and and it was hard to grow to scale so we met a need we improved lives and it just it's the point of taking other people's original ideas and being able to apply them in in new original ways that lead to real disruption because you're thinking about the problem you're trying to solve not just the science you got to do both and i don't want to discredit our scientists he actually was on the forefront of creating the cloning technology as well but it was how he used it and i should add by the way um he's still there 42 years later and decades later he actually was part of the team that create well he was part of a team that did the insulin too the part of the team that delivered developed the pathway for monoclonal antibodies so diabetes to cancer another blockbuster for genotech and you may not know what monoclonal antibodies are but if you've had cancer you know what abastin perceptin and rituxin are and those are up until you know even today those are three of the most popular most important drugs in our regiment so looking at the world differently um applying other people's knowledge is you talked about collaboration in the in the um opening it's really about collaboration and working together to solve big problems i love that example harlan it reminds me when you talk about disruption it reminds me of the definition of of catalytic disruption or catalytic innovation or disruptive innovation being finding a good enough solution to a problem that in in the end makes uh makes society more just and more more equitable so it's not always the most cutting edge although scientific you know discoveries are are critical to the process but sometimes it is finding a new application of an existing innovation that increases quality accessibility affordability and ultimately quality of care and quality of life yeah i mean i mean this is not exactly the example you're saying but mrna is not new it's been around for 30 years a lot of work went into a lot of money and but it's time finally came and it really helped lessen what could have been a tremendous disaster for the globe yeah yeah matt did you want to add any examples where you've seen some um kind of disruptive innovation or these areas of new um applications of existing solutions to different problems or different um contexts yeah i mean going back to my earlier comment around new technologies opening the door for new platforms i mean the shift from on-prem to the cloud with aws has enabled thousands if not hundreds of thousands of startups to roll out technologies that never could have existed without it um twilio moving the telephonic stack from this are you know impenetrable hard to create create experiences on um platform to now any developer in the world can create a text message campaign or a video telehealth kind of experience has has changed the world you know obviously the iphone has probably brought more access to technology and access to care frankly than any device that's ever come before it um so it's all evolutionary but with each evolution comes you know a trickle down of hundreds or thousands of more um you know we we talked a little bit about um mental health and around destigmatizing it in zimbabwe and one of the things that you know gets me really excited is the recent merger between ginger and headspace um you know headspace has been bringing mindfulness to the masses for years in a very like media friendly accessible way where there's absolutely no stigma i mean it levels you it brings you into the moment it makes you healthier and headspace has been trying to bring access to mental health to people through a delightful mobile app that you know puts you know helping one one click away and i think together they can destigmatize and give people better access to to maintenance level checkups to keep us you know like like the the folks in zimbabwe because we have a shortage of um clinical therapists as well and so what can we do to create better practices for for behavioral health and so i love that technology and slight business model disruptions can actually lead to better healthcare healthcare outcomes for hundreds of millions of people and i do hope that technology enables a shift away from dealing with acute chronic care and moves it more towards the preventative primary care model because we have been terrible at that and people usually wait until it's too late to get the help they need and so i hope that startups will be part of that that transition and that business models will follow suit nice nice harlan did you want to talk a little bit about behavioral health and and how some some examples or opportunities you see for innovation there well yeah i mean i think it's um it's just an area for up it's an area for uh disruption and i'll focus on again the ingenuity of it but it's also stepping back and asking yourself what's not working and why isn't it working and how can we look at it from the person point of view so as i look at behavioral health think about in addition to the stigma if you want to get help you got to find a provider and it's it's not a well-kept secret the provider networks are really poor in health plans and even if they technically meet the network adequacy regulations think about what you have to do you have to get an appointment you don't know the person got to go in person got to drive got to leave work got a park gotta go in that waiting room and think about which button do i push and what if someone else walks in am i going to get seen here and if it's close to my office am i going to see someone from work if it's close to my home am i going to see someone i know and then you have your meeting and then you get the stress of missing your work and you go back there's no matching of whether that's the right person now think about it from a mom's point of view um you you got a kid that needs an adolescent therapist good luck finding one and by the way they only meet during school hours so you're gonna now take the kid out of school so here's a system that doesn't work and yet we perpetuate it because it works for a few it works for the so you know this idea of destigmatizing it simple apps but also just thinking why does it have to be in person most you know the newer generation is perfectly happy doing something through video and if you're not let them go in person but give people options by the way there's no data that 50 minutes is the right amount of time so you have to pay for a 50-minute visit where maybe your life is better if you can sneak in a couple 20-minute visits during a busy day so you know we need to be you know you know think about from the person point of view look at the data and stop doing something because we've done it that way before um and that's what disruption and that's you know i i tell that story in detail because i want people think about the innovation challenge to think about in detail what's not working today and how can we fix it you know matt was talking about the user experience and you know kind of technical stuff i'm at the level of why do you have to check in like you if you've been to a hospital or a clinic more than once they should be able to recognize you as you go through the kiosk that should be your check-in you should be told where to where to park and then when you show up there really doesn't need to be a waiting room for you because you've already checked in um i love it when i walk into these really fancy hospitals across across the world and i see the first thing is line up here what what sort of consumer message is that i mean so we we really need to like to question everything in the system and see if we can reinvent it in an appropriate way and and i'm not saying blow it up um i think you know blowing up the system actually has unintended consequences and as most things will affect the underserved more i think we just need to solve problems look at it from the people's point of view and start with the fact that we have inequities in care we have inconvenience and care let's figure out how to you know how to address those one by one and um and then create a new ecosystem over time harlan you you that was very eloquently put and i think there's one level additional that we can put on that which is that not all communities need the same thing what the trans community when they deal with mental health support they might need a different kind of provider some you know an african-american uh patient may need somebody who's culturally sensitive to their upbringing and backgrounds like they're someone who's an immigrant who recently moved here is probably gonna have different requirements and so every we have to layer all of those challenges against the communities that patients are coming from and it's a there's a lot to fix well i i mean i want to go ahead gail i'm sorry well i only have to take us on to to to briefly on to um environmental sustainability for just a minute as well as open up um some see if there's questions in slido but what would you like to add did you want to add something well i was just gonna you know i was talking about the matching and i uh earlier which is what matt's getting to in in detail i i think um you know if you started with the data and you know this we'll get to therapy in a second but if you start with the data 100 the chances of dying of prostate cancer are 111 higher uh in black men than white men the chances of dying in breast cancer are 36 percent higher in black women than white women the system's not working there's data to suggest that people feel more comfortable getting here if they look like them and understand their culture so we should be developing instead of relying on you know can we hire someone into this community um you know i'm waiting for the old-fashioned way of doing staffing can we use technology to allow people to find their match where they're more likely to get screening they're more likely to get early intervention um i mean we just really you got to start with the problem that you're trying to solve and then all of a sudden becomes it becomes a a an act of passion as opposed to an active technology application i think i think that's what we we lack sometimes we kind of look at like how can we make this claim go by and you know get paid more cheaply which is important by the way but we really got to start with what are the people and societal problems we're trying to solve that i just wanted to add that because matt kind of prompted that thought in my head yeah absolutely and and i think that's relevant very specifically to the innovation challenge and how how teams how students put together teams that have a cross-section of of skill sets and optimally experiences and how others can be engaged in that so i do want to talk for a few minutes um about the sustainability component of the innovation challenge and um as as folks may know i mean sustainability and this comes up a lot in my class it means a lot of different things right it can mean organizational sustainability that's what funders are often asking non-profit grantees to talk about their sustainability um there's there's financial sustainability in terms of just business model but we want to focus a bit today on the environmental sustainability component of the innovation challenge um and i know matt you have some experience in this area and some companies in your portfolio i think of an example that sits at the intersection of the environment technology and innovation there's a company in morocco called cloud fisher and basically what they do is they're harvesting the clouds they use nets to capture fog and to put it into that's coming off of the atlantic ocean and they're condensing it into water and pushing it through a filtration system and then piping it into these very dry villages and communities so that they can both have potable water but also to irrigate their lands so cloud fisher for-profit technology company and and there's many many other examples so matt from tell us a little bit from your experience what are some examples of of the environmental uh innovation opportunities either the challenges or or some of the solutions you've seen so i'll caveat this all by saying that i'm absolutely no expert on sustainability although i think we all need to educate ourselves on the state of the problem and what we can individually do to make our own impact because it is an existential threat to each and every human being on this planet at techstars we are very focused on sustainability across the firm so i'm going to speak you know not just at the mat level but right now at the techstars level we have three programs to date that are focused on sustainability one is a program we we run in the nordics with equinor which used to be called stat oil and then they rebrand it as equinor because they even as a utility company are very focused on sustainable energy um we run a program with the alabama power company on the east coast which is uh alabama which is you know focused on on energy and um novel approaches to to reduce um carbon emissions and then we run a program with the nature conservancy as well focused on sustainability everything from preserving our ocean to to climate impact um i'm going to take off my healthcare hat and put on my space hack for a moment so i built a space program for tech stars a few years ago with the united states air force nasa's jet propulsion lab maxar technologies lockheed martin etc and a lot of the companies we were investing in were at the intersection of commercial civil military space and climate change um one of the things that you need to be able to do if you're going to be able to measure climate change is sense the earth and understand where things might be going wrong whether it's a a drought that you can predict because you can take the temperature of every plant or uh humidity level of every plant on the earth and that's a company that i invested in called hydrosat or you are building a sensing capability to detect um gas leaks methane leaks toxic blooms that emerge um due to global warming in a in a body of water there's a company that we invested in called pixel that is that is doing precisely that using hyperspectral imagery um we invested in a company that's taking nuclear waste product so a form of radioactive material called strontium 90 which is produced by nuclear energy reactors we spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to dispose of this material by the way nuclear energy i'm a big proponent it is probably the one of the most cleanest and sustainable forms of energy we can create and we should be absolutely investing significantly more you know obviously within highly regulated environments but we should be investing significantly more in nuclear but anyway these guys can take that waste product and turn it into stable scalable electric power for undersea for remote terrestrial applications for space that's a company called xeno and so you're seeing a lot of really cutting edge technologies coming out of that aerospace independent sector and that's just what i can speak of um i'm you know if you were to bring in some of the managing directors that are my peers and colleagues with you know a much more terrestrial focus you'll you'll be able to hear a lot of incredible advancements around marketplaces for sustainable energy companies that are sequestering co2 and turning them into you know industrial carpets and and bringing bringing market economic forces in line with our goals of reducing carbon emissions to prevent that that increase in temperature which could could frankly kill us all um so it is it is horribly frightening and there's you know a lot we should be doing to to work on this but um it's you know probably beyond my um expertise to go much further than that perfect examples and i think you you pointed out a couple things come to my mind one is is when you're talking about you know carbon emissions the there's a lot of different opportunities for innovation the question is which part of the problem are you focusing on i just think of the the oil spill in orange county like that is the problem what could be done differently from from a technology whether it's detection or response or education if we really focus on what is that element of of the environment and the environmental degradation and the climate crisis we're all facing that our student teams want to address in the innovation challenge it's to focus on a problem to as i say in my class projects apprentice with the problem get to understan
2021-11-04 21:27
