There’s Still Untapped Potential of AI in Healthcare Innovation with Seema Kumar, the Chief Executive Officer of Cure

[00:00:09] Hey, everybody, Saul Marquez with the Health Matters podcast. I want to welcome you back to another episode here in Las Vegas, 2023, with the Health Conference. Today, I have the privilege of having Seema Kumar join us on the podcast. She is from Cure.

[00:00:29] She joined them in 2022 as the chief executive officer. Prior to Cure, Ms. Kumar spent nearly 20 years at Johnson & Johnson in senior leadership roles, including most recently as the global head, Office of Innovation, Global Health and Scientific Engagement. I'm so excited to have you here on the podcast, Seema.

[00:00:48] Thanks for joining. Yeah, it's great to be here, Saul. Yeah. How's the meeting going for you? Oh, wow. It's just thrilling. There's so much to take in, so much to absorb and just makes me optimistic about the future of health care.

[00:01:00] I love that reaction because it is wow. Right. Like what they do here, the experiences and the quality of people. Quality of people is just extraordinary.

[00:01:10] And, you know, if you can just pass by, you know, in one little hallway, you can see so many new digital health companies doing extraordinary things. And this shows the power of technology and how it can really transform health care. Totally agree, Seema.

[00:01:26] And so before we get started with kind of digging into what you guys do at the company, tell us a little bit about what got you started in health care innovation.

[00:01:35] I've always been interested in health care because at the end of the day, you know, we all care about human health.

[00:01:40] And so understanding what really makes humans healthy and sick and then how do we get from being focused on people's sickness to actually health and well-being and potentially cures has always sort of driven my passion.

[00:01:56] But in addition, it's the possibilities that science and technology holds for really changing the paradigm of health care and creating improved health societies.

[00:02:08] And then finally, storytelling, because I think that unless you engage every single individual in their own health and in the health of the ecosystem, health of society, you can't do it.

[00:02:18] So science, health, storytelling, it's three things put together that really will help us shape the future of health care. Thank you, Seema. Yeah. You know, storytelling is powerful from any angle that we look at health from.

[00:02:32] And so given your background in government, academic and in industry organizations, what role do you believe entrepreneurs and industry have in making the health sector more equitable? Entrepreneurs, I think, are a special breed.

[00:02:46] They're a special phenotype of people who are, they tend to be restless with the status quo. They want to take risks and because they are not as capital intensive as big, large organizations, whether it's government or industry or academia, they can move faster.

[00:03:05] They're nimbler and they can represent sort of like the leading edge of what we can do in the future. You do still need the big organizations and institutions to kind of maintain the status quo, but it's very hard to make big change in large organizations.

[00:03:22] So I think entrepreneurs play a special role in sort of being like the little speedboats that can leave the big, large ships and go explore where there's opportunities and where there are risks. The ecosystem, we need each other.

[00:03:37] The large organizations need the smaller ones for advancement and entrepreneurship. Small ones need the large ones for large opportunities and stability. So I love that perspective. How do we as members of the ecosystem fuel that role?

[00:03:52] I think we need to be the connectors for each other because at the end of the day, each one has a role. No individual can do it alone. No specific organization can do it alone.

[00:04:05] It takes all of the people, actors in the ecosystem to make big substantive step change. And so academia is very special at doing what it does best, which is basic research and moving the knowledge forward.

[00:04:22] Industry is best at translating it and bringing those products to market and making it at scale. So you can take a discovery that's a molecule and then turn it into a medicine or a pill that we can just take with a glass of water. So that you need.

[00:04:36] Entrepreneurs are looking at the next new opportunities. And government, you need government. And the role of all of these organizations came into full focus during the pandemic. When everybody worked together, we could get the results faster and get vaccines together.

[00:04:53] And now we're all here at this big, huge, major conference without masks and all feeling safe. And so that's all thanks to everybody working together. Yeah, no, that's a great example, Seema. And I love it. We're here, no masks. Yes. We're back at it. We're back at it.

[00:05:12] And it's thanks to collaboration. Exactly. That's exactly right. Things like the pandemic happen. We make the most out of them. How could we continue that type of collaboration? Because it feels like unless we have a crisis in our hands, collaboration isn't as strong.

[00:05:27] What advice would you give the people? We take a long time to learn. We forget very quickly. That's just human nature, right? And so I think that we need to ensure that the lessons that we learned from the pandemic aren't lost.

[00:05:43] And speaking of a large topic that's in focus here at Health is AI and all the data we gathered, whether it's pandemics, whether it's about cancer, whether it's about viruses, about Alzheimer's disease. We have large, massive sets of data.

[00:06:01] And if you could leverage AI to look into that data, analyze it and look for insights, there is so much to be learned.

[00:06:09] And I think that's sort of like the new frontier is using AI's power in health because we have access to so much data and AI is only as good as the data. And we need large data sets. And we do have that now. We certainly do.

[00:06:24] And there's opportunities all around us to do more with the data. When you think about your organization, how are you guys adding value to the health care ecosystem? Ultimately patients. Just to take a step back, CURE, what is CURE? CURE is an innovation campus in New York City.

[00:06:41] We are about 350,000 square foot of space. We have wet labs, research laboratories. We have businesses and the entire campus holds about 21 companies that call it home. It represents industry, academia, non-for-profit, for-profit, medical devices, therapeutics, value-based health care services and so on.

[00:07:02] So it's sort of representative of different parts of the health care ecosystem. And for us, what is important as we gather more data is the ability for all of these groups to collaborate, to move the needle forward. That's one.

[00:07:17] Second is access to data, but also access to health care. And the two are interrelated. So we have a large amount of data, like we just said, but is the data representative? Is it representative of the population or is it all collected from one type of population?

[00:07:33] White males, for example. Second, is the data complete? Because AI can only be as good as the data. And so it needs to be complete. It needs to be representative.

[00:07:43] And so for us at CURE, what a free exchange of ideas at the intersection of technology, medical devices, therapeutics, sectors like government, public, private, for-profit, non-for-profit to come together to really do an ecosystems approach, solve big, massive challenges that we face today in health care.

[00:08:09] Thank you for that. Now, it sounds like you guys have quite the facility and quite the collaborative base there for a lot of great things to happen. You know, before we started recording, you were sharing with me a little bit about a challenge.

[00:08:22] Can we share that with the listeners? Absolutely. As I said, we all know, I mean, everybody's talking about AI. Whether you know a little bit about it or a lot about it doesn't matter. AI is all the buzz.

[00:08:35] But if you get past all the buzz, it is true that AI holds a lot of promise for health care. But we still don't know. We're barely scratching the surface of what it can potentially do. So our goal was to crowdsource ideas.

[00:08:49] And so we threw out an innovation challenge. We're calling on all entrepreneurs and innovators to come forward with ideas to use AI for good in healthcare. And the winners are going to get seed money and one year residency at Cure to work on their problem.

[00:09:09] And we'll bring a collaborative approach. They'll get mentorship, resources, access to our network and expertise to solve their problems. And so the deadline is October 30th. OK. And so the submission, the application process is open.

[00:09:25] We're asking on people to come forward with their best ideas to leverage AI to solve health care problems. Amazing. Sounds like a phenomenal challenge and a great opportunity for all of you entrepreneurs listening to this podcast.

[00:09:39] So certainly in the show notes, you'll want to take a look and we'll place a link there for you to be able to apply and have a chance to to be part of this amazing challenge and the benefits that come with it if you win. Yes.

[00:09:52] If you go to www.wewillcure.com and search for the challenge, you'll find information all about it and also all about Cure. Amazing. Well, Seema, I want to thank you for spending time with us. This was a fantastic time.

[00:10:07] Again, folks, everything that we discussed, all the notes links will be in the show notes. Seema, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you, Saul. Thank you for having me.