Exploring the future of healthcare AI

InnovationRx is a weekly digest of healthcare news. To receive it in your inbox, Subscribe here.

GThe broadcast from Los Angeles brought together healthcare industry executives, startup founders, and investors. ViVE conference.Naturally, the effect is artificial intelligence The healthcare sector is everyone’s top priority, especially as the battle for customers intensifies. AI medical scribe market. Before the conference starts, abridge announced a $150 million Series C round at a valuation of $850 million (see article below).

Harjinder SandhuCTO of Health and Life Sciences Platforms at Microsoft. Microsoft has a competing product called . DAX co-pilot (at $18.8 billion nuance communications (2022), Microsoft said it is encouraging customers to think about a grid of value and risk when incorporating large-scale language models into healthcare settings.Microsoft invested his $10 billion OpenAI, makers of the model that powers the viral ChatGPT. He explains that AI scribes sit in the “high value, low risk” quadrant during conference presentations because all output is reviewed by a physician. “In the workflow, there are humans who are qualified to evaluate the behavior of the AI ​​system and detect errors,” he said.

The next use case that everyone aspires to, but carries more risk, is using AI models to summarize a patient’s entire medical record history before a doctor’s visit. “In those situations, it’s very difficult to determine whether the system provided incorrect information or not,” Sandhu said. “That’s about right. And he might have one hallucination thrown in there or something left out to convey,” he predicted. chart summary tool Probably one or two years from now.

Another major concern for healthcare customers is data privacy And security. Sandhu explained that LLM is “memoryless,” meaning it doesn’t remember prompts entered by the user. “What you do is remembered by the top software layer that mediates the interaction between the user and the language model,” he says.

John BrownsteinChief Innovation Officer Boston Children’s HospitalSaid forbes They wanted to allow hospital staff to experiment and use GPT for a variety of tasks, but at the same time ensure that no protected health information was sent back to OpenAI through the software layer on top. It also needed to be guaranteed. “We worked with Microsoft to essentially create a separate cloud instance of Azure and give him access to GPT in a segmented way for people within the organization,” he said. I did. “It wasn’t easy,” he added.

Brownstein said Boston Children’s Hospital has created a web portal that allows hospitalized people to essentially access their own hospital. Chat GPT Track logins, tokens, and usage. So far, we have seen that people use it for various tasks. For example, you can ask and get answers about specific hospital protocols or draft patient handoff documents between nursing teams.

Abridge raises $150M to make AI medical scribes smarter

Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures co-led a $150 million Series C investment in Pittsburgh-based startup Abridge. Abridge uses AI to transcribe patient conversations with doctors and automatically convert them into medical records. The company is now valued at $850 million, according to people familiar with the deal.

The round comes just four months after Abridge closed a $30 million Series B that valued the company at $200 million. “This is really due to commercial momentum,” Abridge co-founder and CEO Shiv Rao told Forbes. In the past few weeks, Abridge has begun rolling out to 10 different health systems, he said. In total, Abridge has agreements with more than 10,000 clinicians to use the software, and recently added Yale New Haven Health.

The new funding will be used by the company to expand sales to more hospitals and invest in technology research and development.

Please see here for the detail.

Pipeline and deal updates

vaccine: Baseimmune, which aims to use deep learning to predict future pathogen mutations to develop new vaccines, announces $11.3 million in Series A led by MSD Global Health Innovation Fund and IQ Capital did.

precision medicine: Frontier Medicines, which aims to develop new treatments for previously untreatable targets, announced it has raised $80 million in a Series C round co-led by Droia Ventures and Deerfield Management Company. The funding is intended to advance new drug candidates in the pipeline into clinical trials.

Synthetic biology: Ginkgo Bioworks announced the acquisition of three companies: Reverie Labs, which developed AI and machine learning software for drug discovery; Patch Biosciences, which developed an AI platform for gene sequence design; and Proof Diagnostics, which developed diagnostic and diagnostic tools. Treatment using genome engineering.

Microsurgery: Robotic surgery startup Medical Microinstruments announced it has raised $110 million in a Fidelity-led Series C round to commercialize its surgical system.

Back pain: Mainstay Medical Holdings announced $125 million worth of equity financing aimed at supporting the commercial growth of its neurostimulation products used to treat lower back pain.

AI drug discovery: Absci, a developer of generative AI tools for drug discovery, has announced pricing for its initial public offering that will raise the company’s total capital raised at $75 million.

Viking Weight Loss Pill Targets Ozempic and Munjaro Manufacturer’s Advantage – What You Need to Know

U.S. biotech company Viking Therapeutics this week announced a blockbuster drug from industry giants Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, which dominate the diabetes and obesity space with pharmaceuticals, to surpass its treatment rivals and The company revealed promising data that suggests it is performing well and is a strong contender in the growing weight-loss drug market. Ozempic, Mounjaro, Zepbound, Wegovy, etc.

Please see here for the detail.

Other healthcare news

Medicare Advantage Provider alignment healthcare reported a fourth-quarter net loss of $47.2 million as the number of health plan enrollees increased 21%.

The United States currently tends to have the highest number of cases reported. measles Another contributing factor is that the number of unvaccinated children has increased since 2019.

Lack of transparency in the latest information about Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink Experts said this disregards scientific and ethical norms and raises questions about patient safety and the risk of setting back the entire field of neurotechnology. forbes.

number of abortion The rate of abortions performed in the U.S. each month is “similar, if not higher,” than the rate before the Supreme Court overturned it. Roe vs. Wade New research says it will happen in June 2022.

organ collection organization Federal prosecutors in at least five states are investigating fraud charges after years of scrutiny of flaws plaguing the nation’s organ transplant networks.

beyond forbes

TikTok’s lawyers repeatedly warn executives that they may violate data laws

Who can loan President Trump $540 million?

This $4 billion car monitoring startup claims to reduce crime. But that may have broken the law.

what else are you reading

U.S. launches UnitedHealth antitrust investigation (Wall Street Journal)

Cholera vaccine shortage hits record high, experts fear deadly outbreak (statistics)

International committee calls for increased oversight of dangerous pathogen research (Science)