The Harry Glorikian Show - Modicus Prime Safeguards Drug Manufacturing

Modicus Prime Safeguards Drug Manufacturing

11/21/23 • 44 min

Quality control is one of those things that only a select few people pay attention to—until something goes wrong, then everyone cares. That's especially true in the drug manufacturing industry, where episodes like cross-contamination in a drug factory can shut down a production line and create instant shortages of important medicines. And if a contaminated medicines ever does get shipped out to clinics or stores, people’s lives can be at stake. So drug makers are usually pretty receptive toward any new technology that can help them detect manufacturing problems before they get out of hand.

That’s the market opening that Harry's guest Taylor Chartier says she saw back in 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic. Chartier watched the stories about the Baltimore company Emergent BioSolutions, which was manufacturing vaccines for Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca and had to throw out millions of doses of both vaccines due to suspected cross-contamination, and thought: there has to be a better way. So she started her own company. And today her startup Modicus Prime is partnering with top pharma companies to use new machine vision and AI capabilities to catch drug manufacturing problems faster.

For a full transcript of this episode, please visit our episode page at http://www.glorikian.com/podcast

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For a full transcript of this episode, please visit our episode page at http://www.glorikian.com/podcast

Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:

1. Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

3. Scroll down to find the subhead titled "Ratings & Reviews."

4. Under one of the highlighted reviews, select "Write a Review."

5. Next, select a star rating at the top — you have the option of choosing between one and five stars.

6. Using the text box at the top, write a title for your review. Then, in the lower text box, write your review. Your review can be up to 300 words long.

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That's it! Thanks so much.

Previous Episode

AI Isn't Magic, But It Can Save Lives, says HDAI's Nassib Chamoun

There’s a lot of talk out there about how artificial intelligence will change the way doctors and nurses take care of patients; you hear some of it right here on this show. But all of that still feels like a forecast rather than a present reality. When you look really closely, it’s hard to find concrete examples where AI is already helping healthcare providers make better decisions that improve patient outcomes and take costs out of the system.

That’s why Harry wanted to have Nassib Chamoun on the show. Chamoun is the founder and CEO of Health Data Analytics Institute (HDAI), which has been working with a major healthcare system, Houston Methodist, to test out a working platform called HealthVision. It's a collection of AI-driven models that use huge amounts of data, both from Medicare and from Houston’s own electronic health record system, to make predictions that help doctors and administrators spend less time poring over records and data, and more time interacting with actual patients and making good clinical and management decisions.

Nassib has a way of talking about HDAI and HealthVision that leaves out the hype and focuses on the real-world problems AI can solve for doctors and administrators—like how to identify the patients discharged from hospitals to their homes or to skilled nursing facilities who are at the highest risk of complications, and which interventions could help keep them alive and prevent readmission. Nassib tells Harry that “AI is not magic" and points out that even the most famous large language models, like ChatGPT, are just massive statistical representations of data created, collected, or curated by humans. And while these models are powerful, Nassib argues they’ll need guardrails around them to guarantee transparency and explainability and to prevent bias, before they can be useful in high-stakes fields like healthcare.

HDAI has raised tens of millions of dollars of capital and spent seven years developing HealthVision, and now the company is getting ready to grow beyond Houston Methodist and deploy the system at other big healthcare institutions like the Cleveland Clinic and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute—so more providers will get a chance to test whether AI can keep patients healthier and make healthcare delivery more efficient.

For a full transcript of this episode, please visit our episode page at http://www.glorikian.com/podcast

Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:

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Next Episode

AI and Microbiomes 101 with Jona

There are about 30 trillion human cells in your body, but there are about 38 trillion bacterial cells, mostly hanging out in your large intestine. And that’s not even counting all the viruses, fungi, protists, and other microbial cells that live on your skin, in your bloodstream, and all around your body. So in effect, what you think of as you is not really you. You’re actually a walking colony of many different organisms. All of which cooperate peacefully, for the most part—unless the balance goes awry, and then you can get very sick, very fast.

The microbiome has been getting more and more attention from researchers and doctors now that we’re starting to have the tools we need to identify and measure all those microbes and see what they’re up to. Harry's guest this week is serial healthcare and AI entrepreneur Leo Grady, whose company Jona is on a mission is to help patients and physicians keep up with the skyrocketing amount of scientific literature about the microbiome and try to translate it into real steps people can take to improve their health.

If you’re a Jona customer, you start by sending in a fecal sample. Then the company uses a large-scale gene sequencing technique called shotgun metagenomics to get a profile of all the microbes in your GI tract. Since everyone’s microbiome contains a different mix of microbes, the next step is to use large language models to sift through the published science about the microbiome and find the studies that relate to the specific bugs in your microbiome. Then the company gives patients and their doctors a report that parses out whether their microbiome makeup might be contributing to their health problems, and whether there might be any health or nutritional interventions that would help. It’s all in the early stages. And right now Jona’s test is mostly available through concierge medical services, executive health clinics, and other offices that do a lot of cash-pay tests. But Grady thinks that over the long term the service has the potential to turn the microbiome from a former black box into something closer to what he calls an “organ of data"—meaning a part of the body that doctors can, in a sense, visualize and analyze in the same way we can use MRI and other forms of imaging to scan our other organs.

For a full transcript of this episode, please visit our episode page at http://www.glorikian.com/podcast

Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:

1. Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

3. Scroll down to find the subhead titled "Ratings & Reviews."

4. Under one of the highlighted reviews, select "Write a Review."

5. Next, select a star rating at the top — you have the option of choosing between one and five stars.

6. Using the text box at the top, write a title for your review. Then, in the lower text box, write your review. Your review can be up to 300 words long.

7. Once you've finished, select "Send" or "Save" in the top-right corner.

8. If you've never left a podcast review before, enter a nickname. Your nickname will be displayed next to any reviews you leave from here on out.

9. After selecting a nickname, tap OK. Your review may not be immediately visible.