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Dr. David Fajgenbaum

๐Ÿ‘ค Speaker
1737 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

And so now within this giant graph of every disease, every gene, every protein, you would find Castleman's with lines or edges to these two concepts and then lines or edges to serolimus.

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

And you would see a connection between them.

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

And so now imagine doing that for every disease, every gene, every protein, basically what the world knows about all of medicine.

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

That's exactly right.

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

This leads to this, leads to this, and this reverses this, which reverses this, reverses that.

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

Everything is there.

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

It's everything.

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

Well, now what we do is we train machine learning algorithms on all of those known treatments.

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

So like the serolimus for Castleman's, sildenafil for pulmonary arterial hypertension, insulin for diabetes.

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

Imagine training this algorithm, because machine learning algorithms are so good

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

at finding patterns.

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

And so we're giving the machine learning algorithm lots of information about known treatments.

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

And we're saying, this is an example of when a drug works for a disease.

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

And we do it thousands of times with all of the treatments that are out there for all the diseases that are out there.

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

And then we say, okay, algorithm, now go and score how close of a pattern the connection is between a known treats relationship for every other drug versus every disease.

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

So if a toenail fungus drug works

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

looks like there's no way it could work for pancreatic cancer, you need to give it as close to a zero as possible, 0.0001, right?

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

But if leucovorin looks really promising for a subtype of autism, because the pattern of connections are there and there's a clear intermediary between that subtype of autism and that metabolite, give it a high score, so you get a 0.99.

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

And so now what we do, we do all 4,000 drugs, all 18,000 diseases.

Radiolab
The Medical Matchmaking Machine

So it's about 75 million scores that we generate, that our machine learning algorithms generate.