July 1, 2026 • 45 mins
When Dr. Lara Jehi began treating epilepsy patients in the 2000s, critical surgical decisions were driven more by clinician intuition and expertise than data. Today, she is a leader of IBM and Cleveland Clinic’s Discovery Accelerator, using advanced AI and quantum computing to transform how researchers analyze data, simulate molecules, accelerate drug discovery, and develop more precise treatments. Malcolm Gladwell talks with Dr. Jehi about how quantum computing is changing biomedical research, and what these breakthroughs could mean for the future of healthcare and life sciences.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everyone, it's Robert and Joe here. Today we've got
something a little bit different to share with you. It's
a new season of the Smart Talks with IBM podcast series.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
This season on Smart Talks with IBM, Malcolm Gladwell is back,
and this time he's taking the show on the road.
Malcolm is stepping outside the studio to explore how IBM
clients are using artificial intelligence to solve real world challenges
and transform the way they do business.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
From accelerating scientific breakthroughs to reimagining education. It's a fresh
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edge solutions.
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You'll hear from industry leaders, creative thinkers, and of course
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New episodes of Smart Talks with IBM drop every month
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This is a paid advertisement from IBM.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
H'm Malcolm Gladwell and you're listening to Smart Talk with IBM.
When doctor Laura Jahi began treating epilepsy patients in the
early two thousands, she noticed something unsettling. Different surgeons could
look at the exact same case and recommend completely different treatments.
One surgeon might remove one part of the brain, another
(01:19):
a different part, and a third might not operate at all.
Doctor j Hi believed there had to be a better way,
one grounded in data. That conviction set her on a
path that would lead her to become Chief Research Information
Officer at Cleveland Clinic and the executive program lead for
the Discovery Accelerator. The Discovery Accelerator is a ten year
(01:42):
partnership between Cleveland Clinic and IBM where researchers are using
AI and quantum computing to make incredible discoveries in healthcare
and life sciences. I sat down with doctor j Hi
to explore what's happening now, what's possible with quantum computing,
and where this next era of biomedical discovery is headed.
(02:05):
Epilepsy was your kind of specialty within neurology, correct? Yes,
what led you to that?
Speaker 4 (02:10):
I was always fascinated by the brain. You know, it's
the part of our body that lives still to this
day the most to be discovered. So I was always
intrigued by areas that leave more for discovery. And epilepsy
was my pragmatic side, wanting to choose a subspecialty where
(02:33):
the problem can be fixed. In epilepsy, there are many
medications that are very effective, and there's a brain surgery
that we can do to stop seizures when medicines don't work.
Speaker 5 (02:45):
That attracted me.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
You know, compared to other areas in neurology, like stroke,
for example, or dementia, where usually the damage is more definite.
I wanted to be able to tell my patients that
you have a big problem, but here's what I can.
Speaker 5 (03:02):
Do to fix it, and epilepsy offered me that.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
But what would There must have been interesting and intriguing
unsolved problems in neurology.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
Oh my gosh, it's the whole brain, isn't it. Before
starting to deal with artificial intelligence and research. Right in
the neurology, I'm dealing with real intelligence, the human brain
and how it works and how we think and how
we make decisions, and how it.
Speaker 5 (03:34):
Can grow and evolve.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
And so there is many untaped questions in neurology.
Speaker 5 (03:41):
And that's part of the fascination in it.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
In epilepsy in particular, it's an electrical disease in the brain.
It's actually one of the conditions in a neurology that's
a perfect alignment of all of the scientific disciplines. It's
biology and physics and chemistry all working together to make
(04:09):
us who we truly are. Right, So every other discipline,
if you think of computing, for example, it's purely electricity.
Or if we do drug development or drug discovery, that's
mostly chemistry experiments in the lab, that's mostly biology. But
the human brain is all of those put together. The
(04:35):
cells in our brain secret these chemical substances that diffuse
everywhere and hook up where they need to to trigger
certain circuits and then trigger some effects afterwards. So it
was just an elegant science that has big impacts.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
We're shortly going to get there and talk about you've
taken on this kind of very techn aology focused roller
Cleveland Clinic. I'm curious about if we go back to
when you were just starting out at Cleveland Clinic. Yeah,
how much were you thinking about this sort of technology piece,
about what technology could do for your specialty? About was
(05:17):
that on your mind or is this something you've come
to more recently.
Speaker 4 (05:21):
Well, it's been a journey, right, and when I started
training as a clinician, my priority was just to learn
how to better care for my patients and how to
be a better physician.
Speaker 5 (05:34):
Right, And then I.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
Realized that clinical practice provides an immediate reward. I'm interacting
with a human being and helping them in the moment,
so there is that immediate reward that comes with that.
Speaker 5 (05:48):
But that wasn't enough. I wanted something more.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
So then I learned biomedical research practices, and research offered
me this path towards a future. You know, the reward
there is more long term. I'm studying discovering things that
could help many people in the future, even though I
will never get to see them or meet them, or
(06:13):
you know, have that immediate satisfaction. So that shifted me
from being a pure clinician to being a clinician scientist.
And as that journey progressed, it became very clear, as
medicine evolved over the past twenty years, that we cannot
do any good biomedical research without understanding data and technology.
(06:34):
You know, the balance is shifting from most of the
research is happening we call it, you know, on the
wet bench, with actual experiments, physical experiments, to a place
where most of the work is happening through compute and
simulations and data. So I became much more involved for
(06:56):
my personal research in building big data models and learning
about AI and you know, learning about technology in general.
And then as that journey progressed, I was fortunate enough
to be a role for Cleveland Clinic where my job
is to bring that technology and bridge it to research
(07:18):
for all researchers across our healthcare system.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
When you were talking about how in your own research
you were moving in that direction, what was your own
research focused on. What were you looking at?
Speaker 4 (07:31):
I was looking at brain surgery for epilepsy. It's an
intervention that's been around for decades actually, but when I
started practice, I was shocked by, you know, the practice
that we had were making decisions around surgery, like, you know,
what patients should get it versus not, how likely is
(07:55):
it to work? What part of the brain should we remove.
All of those visions were at the time and the
early two thousands driven by clinical opinions. Right, you know,
you have an experienced surgeon, they decide to do this.
Somebody else might decide to do something completely different. And
I didn't feel that that was the right way to
(08:17):
practice medicine.
Speaker 5 (08:17):
You know that we.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
Needed to be more evidence based and data driven. So
I went in the business in research of building models,
predictive models that can ingest data from all of the
tests that we would do about on these patients before to.
Speaker 5 (08:35):
Figure out surgery.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
So I learned how to analyze all types of data
from genetic data and individuals to pictures to electrical recordings
and then combine those into these prediction models.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
So basically you're looking at you're taking large numbers of
surgeries for epilepsy, and you're seeing what kind of connection
there is between the success of the surgical intervention and
the underlying presentation of.
Speaker 5 (09:07):
The patient exactly.
Speaker 4 (09:08):
So I would be telling the patient what is your
specific chance of becoming seizure free with surgery instead of
giving them statistics about you know, like you know, in general,
how well is that going to be effective? So that
piece of individualizing medicine.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
So Cleveland Clinic decides to create a post called Chief
Information Officers.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
If research information we have research, yes, always, chief information
officer runs it.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Oh yes, chief research information.
Speaker 5 (09:39):
Yeah, so it for research.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
This is parenthetically a huge job. Yes, So you apply
for this, do you know that you're going to be
thinking and talking and dealing with quantum.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
I started in January twenty twenty, and like every leader
who's put in a position, remember everybody tells you should
read that the first ninety days, Oh great, how to plan.
So I was reading that and doing my listening tours
to understand, and then COVID hits and I had a
(10:15):
call from our executive suite about all, there is this
thing called COVID that's coming. We will start testing people
in four days. People will want to do research with COVID.
Speaker 5 (10:28):
Make it happen.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
So it was there's no chapter in the book about that,
you know, So so I then it really it was
like a pressure cooker, you know.
Speaker 5 (10:42):
Test with Yeah, I have to create.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
This access to data, structured you know, resources so that
we can learn from it as quickly as possible. And
so that was a catalyst. So then comes twenty twenty one.
That was the year of our centennial one hundred years
for Cleveland Clinic. So everybody, not just me, we were
(11:06):
in a mindset where we were thinking long, long term,
you know, like what made us specialized till now? How
do we stay relevant? Where is the world going to
be ten years from now? And what should I get
going right this moment to shape that and be ready
for it. And that's when quantum came in my mind,
(11:28):
where unless we invest in it now twenty twenty one,
we will not be ready for this next computer revolution
that's coming after AI.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Everybody in the world right now is doing nothing but
talking about AI, and you are already thinking one step
beyond the quantum? What's different about the opportunity that quantum
creates for American research than AI.
Speaker 5 (11:57):
Biology?
Speaker 4 (11:58):
The human body, by definition, is much closer to fundamentals
of quantum, you know, to quantum mechanics and quantum physics
than it is to AI. AI is a classical computing
approach that in essence reduces every piece of data to
(12:21):
a black or white binary categorization of a.
Speaker 5 (12:26):
One or a zero.
Speaker 4 (12:28):
At its core nature around us, the human body, there
is nothing categorical about it. It's that whole, you know,
continuum of colors of life. Quantum its principles are that,
(12:49):
you know, so there's all the scientific principles about quantum
physics and superposition and in tanker, all of these complex
things that people have a hard time with. But for
in essence, it really is much more aligned, Like if
I want to draw a colored picture, I will not
(13:10):
go and pick up charcoal. You know, It's much easier
for me to draw it if I had a colored
palette with me.
Speaker 5 (13:18):
And quantum offers that.
Speaker 4 (13:20):
There is plenty of situations in medicine that are just intractable,
you know, meaning it's not an issue just of it
being AI being slow, or it doesn't have enough data,
or if only we got more GPUs, you know, we
can answer those questions. There are some problems in medicine
(13:42):
that are fundamentally such that even if you give me
all the GPUs in the world, there is no way
that AI can model accurately how these molecules in the
body are interacting among each other, or how comp electrons
are moving within the mitochondria. These are the engines within
(14:06):
our cells. There's these fundamental things in biology that AI
and classical computers are just not built to be able
to simulate.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
So you must go to dinner parties, doctor j. High.
People must ask you what is quantum computing? What do
you tell them?
Speaker 4 (14:26):
Yes, although I often, you know, we talk about other
things at dinner parties.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
Eventually it comes down to you. If I was at
that dinner party with you, I would ask you what
is quantic computer?
Speaker 6 (14:39):
I would say, depends on how much time we have
at the party to explain it. The short answer would be,
it's a completely different way of working with computers than
what we're used to right now. You can imagine that
AI as being like a car that you take to
go from one place to another. No matter how fast
(15:02):
that Ferrari can get and how much fewre you put
in it, it's never going to be a fighter jet.
Speaker 5 (15:09):
It's never going to be a plane.
Speaker 4 (15:11):
AI is the car, the plane is quant They are
ways to get from point A to point B, but
they work very differently, and we always use them in together.
If I'm flying from Shaker Heights to Yorktown Heights, I
drive to the airport, get on the plane, then take
(15:33):
an uber to get to Yorktown Heights. In research, we
will do the same. We do some piece of it
in AI, some piece of it in Quantum, and then
go back and forth.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
Back in twenty twenty one, Cleveland Clinic and IBM announced
it they were starting something called the Discovery Accelerator. What
is that?
Speaker 4 (15:52):
It's an initiative, a program, a partnership really that is
designed to a bridge at advanced computational tools and technology
through the leader in that space, IBM with biomedical science
and research and life sciences problems, and that is a
(16:17):
Cleveland clinic. We called it a discovery accelerator because that
was our goal. You know, we were both on both
sides challenged to the fact that discovery in medicine was
just taking too long. The classical example that really brought
it to life to us then was drug discovery that
it took over a decade and it still does actually
(16:40):
over a decade. From the moment that there is a
compound that someone in a lab biomedical lab thinks it
would be effective to treat a certain disease, it takes
about ten to thirteen years from that moment to when
that drug is on a shelf for a patient to
get tool from a pharmacy. And that was just too
(17:02):
much of a gap to allow when we have so
many health conditions that we needed to address, and a
big part of that gap could be computationally solved. Better
simulation of compounds, designing drug trails that are more efficient,
you know, that would finish faster. So that was the
(17:23):
motivation to bring computational tools and technology closer to biomedical researchers.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
Cleveland Click and IBM team up, and I'm assuming the
IBM Quantum guys and other people descend on Cleveland and
you have your first meeting with them. Are they telling
you things you would never thought of? Or I mean,
I'm just curious about what's the difference between what you
thought was the potential was and what you discovered the
(17:54):
potential was.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
That is an excellent question if I had to prioritize.
Is one lesson that I learned over the past few
years of doing this. It is that you can never
know what your you know where your brain is going
to go and discovery until you talk. You know, you
(18:19):
have to open it up and really listen to try
to learn what the other people are saying.
Speaker 5 (18:24):
It's it went both ways.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Can you give you an example.
Speaker 4 (18:27):
So, okay, we built the quantum right, so it took
it took like eight months to get this machine put together, and.
Speaker 5 (18:34):
We put it in our cafeteria. That's the whole other story.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
Where you put the quantum machine computer in your cafeteria? Yes, yes, yes,
Can you see it when you're eating lunch?
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (18:47):
Yeah, we have people eating lunch around it all the time.
We wanted to have a machine that people can see.
Otherwise it the program wouldn't launch properly.
Speaker 5 (18:57):
So I needed to have it physics.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
So we had to look at retrofitted in existing space,
and the cafeteria space worked out.
Speaker 5 (19:06):
It was far enough from the street, you know, there was.
Speaker 4 (19:09):
No vibration that it was a double floor, you know,
so the ceiling was high enough. It just like technically
fit all of those requirements. And it was either there
or we put it in our data center, which is
a building and like another city close to Cleveland, and
(19:30):
we picked the cafeteria.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Yeah, now why I know this is sort of this
is kind of hilarious, but there's a serious point I
I want to touch on, which is why do you
need it on premises?
Speaker 4 (19:42):
On the premises Cleveland Clinic research, We needed to change
how we think about research and shift the mindset of
all of our researchers and all.
Speaker 5 (19:56):
Of our researchers.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
I'm talking about three thousand individuals who are one hundred
percent doing biomedical research and Cleveland Clinic two one hundred
and thirty labs individual pis. So that's the scale that
I'm talking about that we had to create an impact
on so.
Speaker 5 (20:17):
Having it having it be there was.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
As much for inspiration and to trigger our motivation to
change as it was a you know, a practical solution, say,
because we had the space and the connections and all of.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
That I saw in it. IBM headquarters. They're beautiful.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
Their works of art they are They're gorgeous, and the
one that we have is the most gorgeous one of all.
Speaker 5 (20:49):
This is not me, you know, the mom bias talking
about it.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
It is you know, they got an award, the Red
Dot Award for Design went to IBM and Cleveland Clinic
for our quantum and the quantum that IBM built for
RPI a couple of years after hours. They modeled it
(21:15):
after hours, not after the you know the ones from before.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
Just just so people know, we're talking about basically a
small garage.
Speaker 4 (21:26):
Size eleven foot by eleven eleven feet eleven feet.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
You know, the cube small.
Speaker 4 (21:31):
So it's a it's a glass cube, and the glass
comes all the way from Italy. It's the same glass
that protects the Crown jewels and you know the Mona
Lisa and all that. So so there's a glass all
around and then there is the tube that you see,
(21:53):
the stainless tube that's shiny, you know, and clean, but
the technologies all inside of it, you know, the the
leer and then the processor and the bottom.
Speaker 5 (22:02):
And it's just a fascinating thing to watch. And it hums.
It makes the sound so even it sounds alive.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
You have a great deal of affection for your computer,
and we.
Speaker 5 (22:18):
Love our machine.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
I want to go back to something you said before,
which is when you had your initial conversations with IBM,
both sides learned things that they hadn't previously thought of.
Give me an example of something that either side hadn't
realized could be done with this new technology.
Speaker 4 (22:37):
Sure, I mean on the equivalent clinic side, we thought
that what quantum should be good for is that it
would be a faster computer, right, so that we have
these big data sets that are requiring much more compute
power and you know GPUs than what we have and
we should.
Speaker 5 (22:56):
Just run them on the quantum.
Speaker 4 (22:59):
And what we came to realize is that quantum actually
does not do well with these large data sets. What
it does well with our smaller, better defined data sets,
but ones where simulation is more important, you know, we
have to run them through multiple models, you multiple simulations
(23:22):
of how they interact. As an example, one of the
very first projects we threw at Quantum was wanting to
predict complications cardiac complications from general surgery using electronic health
record data. So data from our electronic health records are
by definition these really big data sets. You have in
(23:43):
them every single thing that you know about the patient
that you've collected. And we thought that Quantum would help
us build models, better models with this data. And it
failed miserably. It wasn't good, you know, at doing that thing.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
And why didn't it? Like that problem because it's too
it's too bigger than wieldy.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
Well, because the hardware isn't tready right, So the hardware
with Quantum, that issue was back then. You know, now
we've upgraded our processor. But still Quantum now is limited
by noise and by its ability to correct for errors
when it's doing computation. And the more data that you
(24:29):
throw at it that you require it, you know, to
put in its system, you know, to model interactions, the
more errors it's likely to make. So then the harder
it is for it to get to an answer.
Speaker 5 (24:42):
That you can trust.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
Now, we made a lot of progress sense, which I'm
sure we'll get to.
Speaker 5 (24:50):
I hope we'll get.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
To with some recent breakthroughs that we made in that
space with modeling large compounds and interactions. But the way
that got us to where we are now where we
could model large interactions, it took us figuring out that
we shouldn't be doing everything on quantum.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
So give me an example of a problem that quantum
is ideally suited for that the quantum really.
Speaker 4 (25:17):
Likes in drug discovery, for examine chemistry, it likes chemistry
a lot because in chemistry what it has to What
we wanted to model is how a drug that we
put in our body is going to interact with We
say the protein you know, the target, the ligand that
(25:38):
it needs to bind too, like you know, the drug
is the key and it needs to fit in a
lock in certain parts of the body to open it,
get in, do it stay. And there are many keys,
many potential compounds that we could test for many parts
of our body. We don't really know how they're going
(25:58):
to interact. Tradition, what we do is we have to
build all the keys. We have to manufacture all these
compounds and then do actual trial clinical trials, put them
in people, put them in animals and see what happens.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
See which one is best?
Speaker 4 (26:11):
See yeah, which like two fit best together. So we
use AI to try to help us with that. But
AI can only model what it had learned, right, So
for rare diseases conditions that there isn't enough information out
there on what the you know, the locks look like,
(26:32):
it's really hard to then model it with AI and
get an accurate prediction of whether there's a fit or not.
Quantum does not rely on the previous data for its modeling.
Speaker 5 (26:45):
Quantum does.
Speaker 4 (26:46):
It's modeling purely based on the physical characteristics of the
compound of the key you know that you're designing. So
that makes it ideal because it's then untethered with It's
not limited by do we have enough samples or don't
we have enough samples, or you know, what the previous
studies find or not. It's purely based on those physical properties,
(27:11):
those quantum properties. So we found ourselves in situations where
we were able to predict the fits between certain targets,
and where in conditions like Alzheimer's disease, for example, we
published where the quantum based modeling of the compound was
(27:35):
much better than what we would have gotten with what
we got right, Like, we did it both ways, and
the quantum one was the better fit than the AI
generated one.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
This is fair. Quantum is a little more of an
artist and a little less of a of a kind
of nerd AI sounds nerdy to me. What seems like
creative and artistic, creative, creative.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
It's like people, Yeah, it's it opens up path that
you never knew existed. That's why when I get asked
about what do I see is the best, you know,
the the most important breakthrough that quantum is going to
allow us to do, my answer is I really don't know,
because we I You know, when other people invented these
(28:26):
new technologies, I don't think they really knew that they're
you know, like think of laser. I don't think the
person who invented laser thought that they will be used
to scan groceries at the grocery store.
Speaker 5 (28:39):
You know.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
But so technology developing technology, the way I think of
it is like having a baby. You know, you raise
it as best you can, but then they're going to
go off and do their thing, and you will be
tying them down if you restrict them to just what
you thought they should do, you know, So it.
Speaker 5 (29:02):
Opens up that.
Speaker 4 (29:04):
Space, that creative space for us to ask questions.
Speaker 5 (29:09):
Differently than we used to.
Speaker 4 (29:11):
We should train our mind to stop starting from classical
and then trying to squeeze it into quantum. We have
to learn how to think quantum up front, right from
the beginning, which we haven't really been doing as a
scientific community since our inception. We were trained, and how
(29:33):
do you convert what you're thinking into a formula that
you can ask from a computer which is a classical
right computer with quantum because of how it works, it
can answer questions, It can look at problems in a
very different way. So we have to think differently about
(29:55):
the questions and how we ask them.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
With IBM, you recently modeled protein with over twelve thousand atoms.
Talk to me about that and why it's so meaningful
for drug discovery.
Speaker 4 (30:07):
So in October of twenty twenty four, so just eighteen
months ago, the largest compound biological compound that could be
simulated with quantum was ten atoms big, and it was
unfathomable back then that we will get past the thousand
(30:30):
or few thousand atom simulation in the foreseeable future. And
what our team with IBM and with Rieken in Japan,
published last month April twenty twenty six, is a simulation
of the electrical properties of an enzyme trips in in
(30:55):
the body That is twelve thousand, six hundred atoms big
for you know, orders of magnitude beyond what anybody thought
was possible in that span of time. And the reason
why that happened was because of a you know, innovations
(31:16):
in the technology itself where the teams stopped thinking of
quantum and AI as competitors and instead thought of them
as different members of the same team. Right you're you're
We're now in basketball season in the US, the n
(31:37):
b A, and you need the you need defense, but
you also need your center, somebody to shoot.
Speaker 5 (31:44):
You need all of the pieces to work together.
Speaker 4 (31:48):
So with this, it was figuring out where do I
put you know, when do I put AI on the field,
When do I put Quantum on the field, and how
do I tell them.
Speaker 5 (32:00):
To work together.
Speaker 4 (32:01):
It's the scientific terms the quantum centric super computing. So
quantum is at the center, but we're using our supercomputing
tools AI classical to interact with it and split that
big problem of the twelve thousand, six hundred atoms into pieces,
(32:22):
where some pieces are best served with quantum and others
are best served with classically.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
This distinction that we now cling to AI and quantum
are these very different things develop by different people for
different purposes. What you're suggesting is that's probably going to
go away. Yeah, in the future, these things will work together.
It's going to become teamwork and not one on one
competition exactly.
Speaker 5 (32:49):
And it is that now in Keeveland, Clank.
Speaker 4 (32:51):
I mean, the way we've evolved our priorities with IBM,
it's a realization that both organizations have come to where
really to for progress to happen, we should stop seeing
them as separate. We should put them together and work
(33:12):
to the best of what each piece of technology can provide.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
One theme running through a lot of your your what
you've been talking about is that the arrival of this
new technology requires the researcher to behave differently and that's
one of the reasons why you want the quantum machine
(33:37):
and the on full display. And then you were talking
about how you have to ask different kinds of questions.
I'm curious, can you can you can you elaborate on
that a little bit. So take me back, for example,
to your earliest days. If I had given you all
these tools that people have now, how would your research
(33:57):
have proceeded differently? What would you have done differently?
Speaker 5 (34:02):
You know, I would have.
Speaker 4 (34:06):
Looked at the molecular components of the human brain as
they relate to outcomes of brain surgery way earlier than
I did. The first ten years of my career doing
research was all spent building models that were purely based
(34:28):
on brain waves.
Speaker 5 (34:31):
And pictures of the brain.
Speaker 4 (34:35):
It wasn't until after I hit a wall with my
models aren't getting past that eighty percent accuracy threshold that
I started thinking, oh, you know, there must be something
genetic or you know, more biological that is influencing this.
Had I been exposed to quantum at least as a
(35:00):
onsept right, to quantum computing and what quantum science is
back then, I think it would have opened up my
mind to realize that it's not just about what I see.
You know, there is hidden relationships that exist within the
(35:20):
human body, and that's our genetic makeup and our chemical
makeup that influence what comes to the surface that urge
to dig deeper.
Speaker 5 (35:33):
The other thing, it would have changed.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
Is it would have made me reach out to engineers
and physicists and mathematicians much earlier in my career.
Speaker 3 (35:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And how would it have changed is
a very kind of prosaic question, but just kind of
the day to day life of someone doing medical research.
I mean, the oh wow, you walk into the office
in the morning. How does your day proceed differently when
you're when you have these kinds of tools at your fingertips.
Speaker 4 (36:07):
That's the fundamental question in biomedical research right now, and
it's it's less to do with quantum, more to do
with agentic AI, right, these agents that we can work
with now to help us how to think more creatively
and how to do work that up until now was
(36:32):
more like Scott work that the researchers had to do,
whether it was you know, so the hypothesis generation has
always been the most creative part of aspect of scientific research.
But what comes after it with the data collection, for example,
that was always such a repetitive, you know, exercise, and
(36:57):
then the analysis after that was something that was very
resource intensive and you had to try so many different
approaches before you get to an answer, and that was
fairly complex. Now with access to urgantic AI and you know,
(37:18):
some quantum. Of course, we can spend more of our
energy on the creative thinking part of the aspect of
the work and less on the you know, just that repetitive.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
When you look around, I'm assuming you walk around Cleveland
Clinic and you have lots of conversations with some of
the most brilliant medical researchers in the world. Are you
satisfied with how quickly and aggressively they are adopting these
new technologies or do they still need encouragement from you
to do you have to say that? People? Wait, I've
(37:57):
got this machine in the cafeteria. You should be using
it for this problem.
Speaker 5 (38:01):
How much are you doing.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
That kind of encouraging in cheerleading or is it unnecessary?
Speaker 4 (38:07):
No, there's plenty of cheerleading that's necessary people. You know,
humans don't like to change. It's hardwired in us. So
there is plenty of cheerleading. But what happens is, i
mean the way we built our program to where we
are now, So Cleveland Clinic now is pretty much winning
(38:31):
every global competition. And Quantum for life sciences, whether that's
the welcome trust, you know, Quantum for biological applications. We
our partner, there was a startup in Finland, Algorithmic.
Speaker 5 (38:45):
They're brilliant.
Speaker 4 (38:46):
We worked with them to develop a photodynamic drug therapy
for cancer or whether it is the NIH with they
had an X price challenge for quantum or university is
that we're collaborating with. We have a program that's bringing
startups to our ecosystem. We give them access to the
(39:07):
machine if they have a question that is significant enough
for life sciences universities that we're building a bachelor's, master's,
PhD programs with on quantum computing. We developed that whole
ecosystem around it. If that's not cheerleading, I don't know
(39:28):
what else would qualify for cheerleading. But then what happens
is these early adopters, the risk takers, become the cheerleaders themselves, right,
and then they work with it, they achieve success, and
we're nothing but competitive in medicine and science. Right, So
then it becomes okay, so and so I did this
(39:49):
with this machine, Let me learn it so I can
do the same. And it becomes this virtuous cycle of
then innovation and growth and people wanting to work together.
Speaker 5 (40:03):
It's just been fascinating to watch.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
You said that people don't like change, but you clearly do.
Speaker 5 (40:10):
I do. That's the mindset of researchers, right.
Speaker 4 (40:14):
A researcher is someone who is not afraid to fail,
actually sees failure as a chance to learn something right,
to do better the next time. So we get rejected
all the time and we don't care, right, we keep
moving on with papers.
Speaker 5 (40:30):
Grant applications. So that mindset is what all of.
Speaker 4 (40:37):
Research is built around. So it's a very forward looking mindset.
And Cleveland Clinic as they health system, we wouldn't have
survived one hundred years. We wouldn't have done all of
the firsts that we had. Serotonin the chemical that drives
the whole science of psychiatry and neuroscience that was discovered
(41:01):
in Cleveland Clinic. So as an organization, we have enough
of people who think that way that they will be
the early adopters who will pull the others with them.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
Yeah, one last question, look ahead ten years, pat me
a picture of what quantum and related technologies look like
for a place like Cleveland Clinic and tenures.
Speaker 4 (41:31):
Well, what I hope is that ten years from now,
if I if I'm seeing a patient in clinic who
has bad epilepsy, and for the love of you know,
I can't figure out what medicine do I need to
prescribe to them to make them seizure free. I will
be able to send them to get a blood test
(41:54):
that we can then run through some analytical platform that
leverages both quantum and AI that can model exactly for
that patient what compound, either existing.
Speaker 5 (42:10):
Or not to be developed.
Speaker 4 (42:12):
It's some new chemical that we haven't tested for that
indication yet is going to treat them, you know, make
them seizure free. It's and I think quantum is ideal
for a condition like mine epilepsy, because we are a
(42:33):
rare disease, and I think that benefit that it's going
to have will start with rare diseases, you know, as
I explained earlier, So take any other rare disease. We
should start there and then expand from that to more
complex things like cancer for example, and others. But those
rare conditions where we are left now completely scratching our
(42:57):
heads and going intuition. It will make our care truly precise,
and it will make drug development a more tailored exercise
than the way it is now, where it's like a
hammer that's looking for nails?
Speaker 3 (43:18):
Am I right in thinking that of all of the
over the one hundred year history or more now of
Cleveland clinic, this sounds like the absolute best time to
be a Cleveland clinic.
Speaker 5 (43:26):
Yeah. I love it. No complaints, no complaints, And I
am hiring.
Speaker 7 (43:34):
I need I need those quantum researchers, those people who
are wanting, you know, to apply quant to genetic research,
imaging research, every single aspect of biomedical research.
Speaker 4 (43:49):
We can't afford to just wait on the sideline and
until the technology is ready and then you know, then
it will teach us. It is ready now that twelve
thousand Atham Sam relation wouldn't have happened just a year
and a half ago.
Speaker 5 (44:05):
It's quidinn.
Speaker 3 (44:07):
So the headline of this conversation is we're hiring.
Speaker 5 (44:10):
Yes, Yeah, that's a good headline. We're growing, how about that.
Speaker 3 (44:19):
Smart Talks with IBM is produced by Matt Ramano, Amy Gains, McQuaid,
Trina Menino and Jake Harper. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence,
Mastering by Sarah Buguerer, Music by a Gramoscope, Strategy by
Cassidy Meyer, Sophia Derlon and Tatiana Lieberman. Special thanks to
doctor Laura Jahi, Alicia Real Cooney, and the Cleveland Clinic team.
(44:43):
Smart Talks with IBM is a production of Pushkin Industries
and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to podcasts. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. This is a paid
advertisement for IBM. The conversations on this podcast don't necessarily
(45:03):
represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.
Hey everyone, it's Robert and Joe here. Today we've got
something a little bit different to share with you. It's
a new season of the Smart Talks with IBM podcast series.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
This season on Smart Talks with IBM, Malcolm Gladwell is back,
and this time he's taking the show on the road.
Malcolm is stepping outside the studio to explore how IBM
clients are using artificial intelligence to solve real world challenges
and transform the way they do business.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
From accelerating scientific breakthroughs to reimagining education. It's a fresh
look at innovation in action, where big ideas meet cutting
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Speaker 2 (00:34):
You'll hear from industry leaders, creative thinkers, and of course
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This is a paid advertisement from IBM.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
H'm Malcolm Gladwell and you're listening to Smart Talk with IBM.
When doctor Laura Jahi began treating epilepsy patients in the
early two thousands, she noticed something unsettling. Different surgeons could
look at the exact same case and recommend completely different treatments.
One surgeon might remove one part of the brain, another
(01:19):
a different part, and a third might not operate at all.
Doctor j Hi believed there had to be a better way,
one grounded in data. That conviction set her on a
path that would lead her to become Chief Research Information
Officer at Cleveland Clinic and the executive program lead for
the Discovery Accelerator. The Discovery Accelerator is a ten year
(01:42):
partnership between Cleveland Clinic and IBM where researchers are using
AI and quantum computing to make incredible discoveries in healthcare
and life sciences. I sat down with doctor j Hi
to explore what's happening now, what's possible with quantum computing,
and where this next era of biomedical discovery is headed.
(02:05):
Epilepsy was your kind of specialty within neurology, correct? Yes,
what led you to that?
Speaker 4 (02:10):
I was always fascinated by the brain. You know, it's
the part of our body that lives still to this
day the most to be discovered. So I was always
intrigued by areas that leave more for discovery. And epilepsy
was my pragmatic side, wanting to choose a subspecialty where
(02:33):
the problem can be fixed. In epilepsy, there are many
medications that are very effective, and there's a brain surgery
that we can do to stop seizures when medicines don't work.
Speaker 5 (02:45):
That attracted me.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
You know, compared to other areas in neurology, like stroke,
for example, or dementia, where usually the damage is more definite.
I wanted to be able to tell my patients that
you have a big problem, but here's what I can.
Speaker 5 (03:02):
Do to fix it, and epilepsy offered me that.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
But what would There must have been interesting and intriguing
unsolved problems in neurology.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
Oh my gosh, it's the whole brain, isn't it. Before
starting to deal with artificial intelligence and research. Right in
the neurology, I'm dealing with real intelligence, the human brain
and how it works and how we think and how
we make decisions, and how it.
Speaker 5 (03:34):
Can grow and evolve.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
And so there is many untaped questions in neurology.
Speaker 5 (03:41):
And that's part of the fascination in it.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
In epilepsy in particular, it's an electrical disease in the brain.
It's actually one of the conditions in a neurology that's
a perfect alignment of all of the scientific disciplines. It's
biology and physics and chemistry all working together to make
(04:09):
us who we truly are. Right, So every other discipline,
if you think of computing, for example, it's purely electricity.
Or if we do drug development or drug discovery, that's
mostly chemistry experiments in the lab, that's mostly biology. But
the human brain is all of those put together. The
(04:35):
cells in our brain secret these chemical substances that diffuse
everywhere and hook up where they need to to trigger
certain circuits and then trigger some effects afterwards. So it
was just an elegant science that has big impacts.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
We're shortly going to get there and talk about you've
taken on this kind of very techn aology focused roller
Cleveland Clinic. I'm curious about if we go back to
when you were just starting out at Cleveland Clinic. Yeah,
how much were you thinking about this sort of technology piece,
about what technology could do for your specialty? About was
(05:17):
that on your mind or is this something you've come
to more recently.
Speaker 4 (05:21):
Well, it's been a journey, right, and when I started
training as a clinician, my priority was just to learn
how to better care for my patients and how to
be a better physician.
Speaker 5 (05:34):
Right, And then I.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
Realized that clinical practice provides an immediate reward. I'm interacting
with a human being and helping them in the moment,
so there is that immediate reward that comes with that.
Speaker 5 (05:48):
But that wasn't enough. I wanted something more.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
So then I learned biomedical research practices, and research offered
me this path towards a future. You know, the reward
there is more long term. I'm studying discovering things that
could help many people in the future, even though I
will never get to see them or meet them, or
(06:13):
you know, have that immediate satisfaction. So that shifted me
from being a pure clinician to being a clinician scientist.
And as that journey progressed, it became very clear, as
medicine evolved over the past twenty years, that we cannot
do any good biomedical research without understanding data and technology.
(06:34):
You know, the balance is shifting from most of the
research is happening we call it, you know, on the
wet bench, with actual experiments, physical experiments, to a place
where most of the work is happening through compute and
simulations and data. So I became much more involved for
(06:56):
my personal research in building big data models and learning
about AI and you know, learning about technology in general.
And then as that journey progressed, I was fortunate enough
to be a role for Cleveland Clinic where my job
is to bring that technology and bridge it to research
(07:18):
for all researchers across our healthcare system.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
When you were talking about how in your own research
you were moving in that direction, what was your own
research focused on. What were you looking at?
Speaker 4 (07:31):
I was looking at brain surgery for epilepsy. It's an
intervention that's been around for decades actually, but when I
started practice, I was shocked by, you know, the practice
that we had were making decisions around surgery, like, you know,
what patients should get it versus not, how likely is
(07:55):
it to work? What part of the brain should we remove.
All of those visions were at the time and the
early two thousands driven by clinical opinions. Right, you know,
you have an experienced surgeon, they decide to do this.
Somebody else might decide to do something completely different. And
I didn't feel that that was the right way to
(08:17):
practice medicine.
Speaker 5 (08:17):
You know that we.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
Needed to be more evidence based and data driven. So
I went in the business in research of building models,
predictive models that can ingest data from all of the
tests that we would do about on these patients before to.
Speaker 5 (08:35):
Figure out surgery.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
So I learned how to analyze all types of data
from genetic data and individuals to pictures to electrical recordings
and then combine those into these prediction models.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
So basically you're looking at you're taking large numbers of
surgeries for epilepsy, and you're seeing what kind of connection
there is between the success of the surgical intervention and
the underlying presentation of.
Speaker 5 (09:07):
The patient exactly.
Speaker 4 (09:08):
So I would be telling the patient what is your
specific chance of becoming seizure free with surgery instead of
giving them statistics about you know, like you know, in general,
how well is that going to be effective? So that
piece of individualizing medicine.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
So Cleveland Clinic decides to create a post called Chief
Information Officers.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
If research information we have research, yes, always, chief information
officer runs it.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Oh yes, chief research information.
Speaker 5 (09:39):
Yeah, so it for research.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
This is parenthetically a huge job. Yes, So you apply
for this, do you know that you're going to be
thinking and talking and dealing with quantum.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
I started in January twenty twenty, and like every leader
who's put in a position, remember everybody tells you should
read that the first ninety days, Oh great, how to plan.
So I was reading that and doing my listening tours
to understand, and then COVID hits and I had a
(10:15):
call from our executive suite about all, there is this
thing called COVID that's coming. We will start testing people
in four days. People will want to do research with COVID.
Speaker 5 (10:28):
Make it happen.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
So it was there's no chapter in the book about that,
you know, So so I then it really it was
like a pressure cooker, you know.
Speaker 5 (10:42):
Test with Yeah, I have to create.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
This access to data, structured you know, resources so that
we can learn from it as quickly as possible. And
so that was a catalyst. So then comes twenty twenty one.
That was the year of our centennial one hundred years
for Cleveland Clinic. So everybody, not just me, we were
(11:06):
in a mindset where we were thinking long, long term,
you know, like what made us specialized till now? How
do we stay relevant? Where is the world going to
be ten years from now? And what should I get
going right this moment to shape that and be ready
for it. And that's when quantum came in my mind,
(11:28):
where unless we invest in it now twenty twenty one,
we will not be ready for this next computer revolution
that's coming after AI.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Everybody in the world right now is doing nothing but
talking about AI, and you are already thinking one step
beyond the quantum? What's different about the opportunity that quantum
creates for American research than AI.
Speaker 5 (11:57):
Biology?
Speaker 4 (11:58):
The human body, by definition, is much closer to fundamentals
of quantum, you know, to quantum mechanics and quantum physics
than it is to AI. AI is a classical computing
approach that in essence reduces every piece of data to
(12:21):
a black or white binary categorization of a.
Speaker 5 (12:26):
One or a zero.
Speaker 4 (12:28):
At its core nature around us, the human body, there
is nothing categorical about it. It's that whole, you know,
continuum of colors of life. Quantum its principles are that,
(12:49):
you know, so there's all the scientific principles about quantum
physics and superposition and in tanker, all of these complex
things that people have a hard time with. But for
in essence, it really is much more aligned, Like if
I want to draw a colored picture, I will not
(13:10):
go and pick up charcoal. You know, It's much easier
for me to draw it if I had a colored
palette with me.
Speaker 5 (13:18):
And quantum offers that.
Speaker 4 (13:20):
There is plenty of situations in medicine that are just intractable,
you know, meaning it's not an issue just of it
being AI being slow, or it doesn't have enough data,
or if only we got more GPUs, you know, we
can answer those questions. There are some problems in medicine
(13:42):
that are fundamentally such that even if you give me
all the GPUs in the world, there is no way
that AI can model accurately how these molecules in the
body are interacting among each other, or how comp electrons
are moving within the mitochondria. These are the engines within
(14:06):
our cells. There's these fundamental things in biology that AI
and classical computers are just not built to be able
to simulate.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
So you must go to dinner parties, doctor j. High.
People must ask you what is quantum computing? What do
you tell them?
Speaker 4 (14:26):
Yes, although I often, you know, we talk about other
things at dinner parties.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
Eventually it comes down to you. If I was at
that dinner party with you, I would ask you what
is quantic computer?
Speaker 6 (14:39):
I would say, depends on how much time we have
at the party to explain it. The short answer would be,
it's a completely different way of working with computers than
what we're used to right now. You can imagine that
AI as being like a car that you take to
go from one place to another. No matter how fast
(15:02):
that Ferrari can get and how much fewre you put
in it, it's never going to be a fighter jet.
Speaker 5 (15:09):
It's never going to be a plane.
Speaker 4 (15:11):
AI is the car, the plane is quant They are
ways to get from point A to point B, but
they work very differently, and we always use them in together.
If I'm flying from Shaker Heights to Yorktown Heights, I
drive to the airport, get on the plane, then take
(15:33):
an uber to get to Yorktown Heights. In research, we
will do the same. We do some piece of it
in AI, some piece of it in Quantum, and then
go back and forth.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
Back in twenty twenty one, Cleveland Clinic and IBM announced
it they were starting something called the Discovery Accelerator. What
is that?
Speaker 4 (15:52):
It's an initiative, a program, a partnership really that is
designed to a bridge at advanced computational tools and technology
through the leader in that space, IBM with biomedical science
and research and life sciences problems, and that is a
(16:17):
Cleveland clinic. We called it a discovery accelerator because that
was our goal. You know, we were both on both
sides challenged to the fact that discovery in medicine was
just taking too long. The classical example that really brought
it to life to us then was drug discovery that
it took over a decade and it still does actually
(16:40):
over a decade. From the moment that there is a
compound that someone in a lab biomedical lab thinks it
would be effective to treat a certain disease, it takes
about ten to thirteen years from that moment to when
that drug is on a shelf for a patient to
get tool from a pharmacy. And that was just too
(17:02):
much of a gap to allow when we have so
many health conditions that we needed to address, and a
big part of that gap could be computationally solved. Better
simulation of compounds, designing drug trails that are more efficient,
you know, that would finish faster. So that was the
(17:23):
motivation to bring computational tools and technology closer to biomedical researchers.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
Cleveland Click and IBM team up, and I'm assuming the
IBM Quantum guys and other people descend on Cleveland and
you have your first meeting with them. Are they telling
you things you would never thought of? Or I mean,
I'm just curious about what's the difference between what you
thought was the potential was and what you discovered the
(17:54):
potential was.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
That is an excellent question if I had to prioritize.
Is one lesson that I learned over the past few
years of doing this. It is that you can never
know what your you know where your brain is going
to go and discovery until you talk. You know, you
(18:19):
have to open it up and really listen to try
to learn what the other people are saying.
Speaker 5 (18:24):
It's it went both ways.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Can you give you an example.
Speaker 4 (18:27):
So, okay, we built the quantum right, so it took
it took like eight months to get this machine put together, and.
Speaker 5 (18:34):
We put it in our cafeteria. That's the whole other story.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
Where you put the quantum machine computer in your cafeteria? Yes, yes, yes,
Can you see it when you're eating lunch?
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (18:47):
Yeah, we have people eating lunch around it all the time.
We wanted to have a machine that people can see.
Otherwise it the program wouldn't launch properly.
Speaker 5 (18:57):
So I needed to have it physics.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
So we had to look at retrofitted in existing space,
and the cafeteria space worked out.
Speaker 5 (19:06):
It was far enough from the street, you know, there was.
Speaker 4 (19:09):
No vibration that it was a double floor, you know,
so the ceiling was high enough. It just like technically
fit all of those requirements. And it was either there
or we put it in our data center, which is
a building and like another city close to Cleveland, and
(19:30):
we picked the cafeteria.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Yeah, now why I know this is sort of this
is kind of hilarious, but there's a serious point I
I want to touch on, which is why do you
need it on premises?
Speaker 4 (19:42):
On the premises Cleveland Clinic research, We needed to change
how we think about research and shift the mindset of
all of our researchers and all.
Speaker 5 (19:56):
Of our researchers.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
I'm talking about three thousand individuals who are one hundred
percent doing biomedical research and Cleveland Clinic two one hundred
and thirty labs individual pis. So that's the scale that
I'm talking about that we had to create an impact
on so.
Speaker 5 (20:17):
Having it having it be there was.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
As much for inspiration and to trigger our motivation to
change as it was a you know, a practical solution, say,
because we had the space and the connections and all of.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
That I saw in it. IBM headquarters. They're beautiful.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
Their works of art they are They're gorgeous, and the
one that we have is the most gorgeous one of all.
Speaker 5 (20:49):
This is not me, you know, the mom bias talking
about it.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
It is you know, they got an award, the Red
Dot Award for Design went to IBM and Cleveland Clinic
for our quantum and the quantum that IBM built for
RPI a couple of years after hours. They modeled it
(21:15):
after hours, not after the you know the ones from before.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
Just just so people know, we're talking about basically a
small garage.
Speaker 4 (21:26):
Size eleven foot by eleven eleven feet eleven feet.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
You know, the cube small.
Speaker 4 (21:31):
So it's a it's a glass cube, and the glass
comes all the way from Italy. It's the same glass
that protects the Crown jewels and you know the Mona
Lisa and all that. So so there's a glass all
around and then there is the tube that you see,
(21:53):
the stainless tube that's shiny, you know, and clean, but
the technologies all inside of it, you know, the the
leer and then the processor and the bottom.
Speaker 5 (22:02):
And it's just a fascinating thing to watch. And it hums.
It makes the sound so even it sounds alive.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
You have a great deal of affection for your computer,
and we.
Speaker 5 (22:18):
Love our machine.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
I want to go back to something you said before,
which is when you had your initial conversations with IBM,
both sides learned things that they hadn't previously thought of.
Give me an example of something that either side hadn't
realized could be done with this new technology.
Speaker 4 (22:37):
Sure, I mean on the equivalent clinic side, we thought
that what quantum should be good for is that it
would be a faster computer, right, so that we have
these big data sets that are requiring much more compute
power and you know GPUs than what we have and
we should.
Speaker 5 (22:56):
Just run them on the quantum.
Speaker 4 (22:59):
And what we came to realize is that quantum actually
does not do well with these large data sets. What
it does well with our smaller, better defined data sets,
but ones where simulation is more important, you know, we
have to run them through multiple models, you multiple simulations
(23:22):
of how they interact. As an example, one of the
very first projects we threw at Quantum was wanting to
predict complications cardiac complications from general surgery using electronic health
record data. So data from our electronic health records are
by definition these really big data sets. You have in
(23:43):
them every single thing that you know about the patient
that you've collected. And we thought that Quantum would help
us build models, better models with this data. And it
failed miserably. It wasn't good, you know, at doing that thing.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
And why didn't it? Like that problem because it's too
it's too bigger than wieldy.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
Well, because the hardware isn't tready right, So the hardware
with Quantum, that issue was back then. You know, now
we've upgraded our processor. But still Quantum now is limited
by noise and by its ability to correct for errors
when it's doing computation. And the more data that you
(24:29):
throw at it that you require it, you know, to
put in its system, you know, to model interactions, the
more errors it's likely to make. So then the harder
it is for it to get to an answer.
Speaker 5 (24:42):
That you can trust.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
Now, we made a lot of progress sense, which I'm
sure we'll get to.
Speaker 5 (24:50):
I hope we'll get.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
To with some recent breakthroughs that we made in that
space with modeling large compounds and interactions. But the way
that got us to where we are now where we
could model large interactions, it took us figuring out that
we shouldn't be doing everything on quantum.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
So give me an example of a problem that quantum
is ideally suited for that the quantum really.
Speaker 4 (25:17):
Likes in drug discovery, for examine chemistry, it likes chemistry
a lot because in chemistry what it has to What
we wanted to model is how a drug that we
put in our body is going to interact with We
say the protein you know, the target, the ligand that
(25:38):
it needs to bind too, like you know, the drug
is the key and it needs to fit in a
lock in certain parts of the body to open it,
get in, do it stay. And there are many keys,
many potential compounds that we could test for many parts
of our body. We don't really know how they're going
(25:58):
to interact. Tradition, what we do is we have to
build all the keys. We have to manufacture all these
compounds and then do actual trial clinical trials, put them
in people, put them in animals and see what happens.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
See which one is best?
Speaker 4 (26:11):
See yeah, which like two fit best together. So we
use AI to try to help us with that. But
AI can only model what it had learned, right, So
for rare diseases conditions that there isn't enough information out
there on what the you know, the locks look like,
(26:32):
it's really hard to then model it with AI and
get an accurate prediction of whether there's a fit or not.
Quantum does not rely on the previous data for its modeling.
Speaker 5 (26:45):
Quantum does.
Speaker 4 (26:46):
It's modeling purely based on the physical characteristics of the
compound of the key you know that you're designing. So
that makes it ideal because it's then untethered with It's
not limited by do we have enough samples or don't
we have enough samples, or you know, what the previous
studies find or not. It's purely based on those physical properties,
(27:11):
those quantum properties. So we found ourselves in situations where
we were able to predict the fits between certain targets,
and where in conditions like Alzheimer's disease, for example, we
published where the quantum based modeling of the compound was
(27:35):
much better than what we would have gotten with what
we got right, Like, we did it both ways, and
the quantum one was the better fit than the AI
generated one.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
This is fair. Quantum is a little more of an
artist and a little less of a of a kind
of nerd AI sounds nerdy to me. What seems like
creative and artistic, creative, creative.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
It's like people, Yeah, it's it opens up path that
you never knew existed. That's why when I get asked
about what do I see is the best, you know,
the the most important breakthrough that quantum is going to
allow us to do, my answer is I really don't know,
because we I You know, when other people invented these
(28:26):
new technologies, I don't think they really knew that they're
you know, like think of laser. I don't think the
person who invented laser thought that they will be used
to scan groceries at the grocery store.
Speaker 5 (28:39):
You know.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
But so technology developing technology, the way I think of
it is like having a baby. You know, you raise
it as best you can, but then they're going to
go off and do their thing, and you will be
tying them down if you restrict them to just what
you thought they should do, you know, So it.
Speaker 5 (29:02):
Opens up that.
Speaker 4 (29:04):
Space, that creative space for us to ask questions.
Speaker 5 (29:09):
Differently than we used to.
Speaker 4 (29:11):
We should train our mind to stop starting from classical
and then trying to squeeze it into quantum. We have
to learn how to think quantum up front, right from
the beginning, which we haven't really been doing as a
scientific community since our inception. We were trained, and how
(29:33):
do you convert what you're thinking into a formula that
you can ask from a computer which is a classical
right computer with quantum because of how it works, it
can answer questions, It can look at problems in a
very different way. So we have to think differently about
(29:55):
the questions and how we ask them.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
With IBM, you recently modeled protein with over twelve thousand atoms.
Talk to me about that and why it's so meaningful
for drug discovery.
Speaker 4 (30:07):
So in October of twenty twenty four, so just eighteen
months ago, the largest compound biological compound that could be
simulated with quantum was ten atoms big, and it was
unfathomable back then that we will get past the thousand
(30:30):
or few thousand atom simulation in the foreseeable future. And
what our team with IBM and with Rieken in Japan,
published last month April twenty twenty six, is a simulation
of the electrical properties of an enzyme trips in in
(30:55):
the body That is twelve thousand, six hundred atoms big
for you know, orders of magnitude beyond what anybody thought
was possible in that span of time. And the reason
why that happened was because of a you know, innovations
(31:16):
in the technology itself where the teams stopped thinking of
quantum and AI as competitors and instead thought of them
as different members of the same team. Right you're you're
We're now in basketball season in the US, the n
(31:37):
b A, and you need the you need defense, but
you also need your center, somebody to shoot.
Speaker 5 (31:44):
You need all of the pieces to work together.
Speaker 4 (31:48):
So with this, it was figuring out where do I
put you know, when do I put AI on the field,
When do I put Quantum on the field, and how
do I tell them.
Speaker 5 (32:00):
To work together.
Speaker 4 (32:01):
It's the scientific terms the quantum centric super computing. So
quantum is at the center, but we're using our supercomputing
tools AI classical to interact with it and split that
big problem of the twelve thousand, six hundred atoms into pieces,
(32:22):
where some pieces are best served with quantum and others
are best served with classically.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
This distinction that we now cling to AI and quantum
are these very different things develop by different people for
different purposes. What you're suggesting is that's probably going to
go away. Yeah, in the future, these things will work together.
It's going to become teamwork and not one on one
competition exactly.
Speaker 5 (32:49):
And it is that now in Keeveland, Clank.
Speaker 4 (32:51):
I mean, the way we've evolved our priorities with IBM,
it's a realization that both organizations have come to where
really to for progress to happen, we should stop seeing
them as separate. We should put them together and work
(33:12):
to the best of what each piece of technology can provide.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
One theme running through a lot of your your what
you've been talking about is that the arrival of this
new technology requires the researcher to behave differently and that's
one of the reasons why you want the quantum machine
(33:37):
and the on full display. And then you were talking
about how you have to ask different kinds of questions.
I'm curious, can you can you can you elaborate on
that a little bit. So take me back, for example,
to your earliest days. If I had given you all
these tools that people have now, how would your research
(33:57):
have proceeded differently? What would you have done differently?
Speaker 5 (34:02):
You know, I would have.
Speaker 4 (34:06):
Looked at the molecular components of the human brain as
they relate to outcomes of brain surgery way earlier than
I did. The first ten years of my career doing
research was all spent building models that were purely based
(34:28):
on brain waves.
Speaker 5 (34:31):
And pictures of the brain.
Speaker 4 (34:35):
It wasn't until after I hit a wall with my
models aren't getting past that eighty percent accuracy threshold that
I started thinking, oh, you know, there must be something
genetic or you know, more biological that is influencing this.
Had I been exposed to quantum at least as a
(35:00):
onsept right, to quantum computing and what quantum science is
back then, I think it would have opened up my
mind to realize that it's not just about what I see.
You know, there is hidden relationships that exist within the
(35:20):
human body, and that's our genetic makeup and our chemical
makeup that influence what comes to the surface that urge
to dig deeper.
Speaker 5 (35:33):
The other thing, it would have changed.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
Is it would have made me reach out to engineers
and physicists and mathematicians much earlier in my career.
Speaker 3 (35:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And how would it have changed is
a very kind of prosaic question, but just kind of
the day to day life of someone doing medical research.
I mean, the oh wow, you walk into the office
in the morning. How does your day proceed differently when
you're when you have these kinds of tools at your fingertips.
Speaker 4 (36:07):
That's the fundamental question in biomedical research right now, and
it's it's less to do with quantum, more to do
with agentic AI, right, these agents that we can work
with now to help us how to think more creatively
and how to do work that up until now was
(36:32):
more like Scott work that the researchers had to do,
whether it was you know, so the hypothesis generation has
always been the most creative part of aspect of scientific research.
But what comes after it with the data collection, for example,
that was always such a repetitive, you know, exercise, and
(36:57):
then the analysis after that was something that was very
resource intensive and you had to try so many different
approaches before you get to an answer, and that was
fairly complex. Now with access to urgantic AI and you know,
(37:18):
some quantum. Of course, we can spend more of our
energy on the creative thinking part of the aspect of
the work and less on the you know, just that repetitive.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
When you look around, I'm assuming you walk around Cleveland
Clinic and you have lots of conversations with some of
the most brilliant medical researchers in the world. Are you
satisfied with how quickly and aggressively they are adopting these
new technologies or do they still need encouragement from you
to do you have to say that? People? Wait, I've
(37:57):
got this machine in the cafeteria. You should be using
it for this problem.
Speaker 5 (38:01):
How much are you doing.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
That kind of encouraging in cheerleading or is it unnecessary?
Speaker 4 (38:07):
No, there's plenty of cheerleading that's necessary people. You know,
humans don't like to change. It's hardwired in us. So
there is plenty of cheerleading. But what happens is, i
mean the way we built our program to where we
are now, So Cleveland Clinic now is pretty much winning
(38:31):
every global competition. And Quantum for life sciences, whether that's
the welcome trust, you know, Quantum for biological applications. We
our partner, there was a startup in Finland, Algorithmic.
Speaker 5 (38:45):
They're brilliant.
Speaker 4 (38:46):
We worked with them to develop a photodynamic drug therapy
for cancer or whether it is the NIH with they
had an X price challenge for quantum or university is
that we're collaborating with. We have a program that's bringing
startups to our ecosystem. We give them access to the
(39:07):
machine if they have a question that is significant enough
for life sciences universities that we're building a bachelor's, master's,
PhD programs with on quantum computing. We developed that whole
ecosystem around it. If that's not cheerleading, I don't know
(39:28):
what else would qualify for cheerleading. But then what happens
is these early adopters, the risk takers, become the cheerleaders themselves, right,
and then they work with it, they achieve success, and
we're nothing but competitive in medicine and science. Right, So
then it becomes okay, so and so I did this
(39:49):
with this machine, Let me learn it so I can
do the same. And it becomes this virtuous cycle of
then innovation and growth and people wanting to work together.
Speaker 5 (40:03):
It's just been fascinating to watch.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
You said that people don't like change, but you clearly do.
Speaker 5 (40:10):
I do. That's the mindset of researchers, right.
Speaker 4 (40:14):
A researcher is someone who is not afraid to fail,
actually sees failure as a chance to learn something right,
to do better the next time. So we get rejected
all the time and we don't care, right, we keep
moving on with papers.
Speaker 5 (40:30):
Grant applications. So that mindset is what all of.
Speaker 4 (40:37):
Research is built around. So it's a very forward looking mindset.
And Cleveland Clinic as they health system, we wouldn't have
survived one hundred years. We wouldn't have done all of
the firsts that we had. Serotonin the chemical that drives
the whole science of psychiatry and neuroscience that was discovered
(41:01):
in Cleveland Clinic. So as an organization, we have enough
of people who think that way that they will be
the early adopters who will pull the others with them.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
Yeah, one last question, look ahead ten years, pat me
a picture of what quantum and related technologies look like
for a place like Cleveland Clinic and tenures.
Speaker 4 (41:31):
Well, what I hope is that ten years from now,
if I if I'm seeing a patient in clinic who
has bad epilepsy, and for the love of you know,
I can't figure out what medicine do I need to
prescribe to them to make them seizure free. I will
be able to send them to get a blood test
(41:54):
that we can then run through some analytical platform that
leverages both quantum and AI that can model exactly for
that patient what compound, either existing.
Speaker 5 (42:10):
Or not to be developed.
Speaker 4 (42:12):
It's some new chemical that we haven't tested for that
indication yet is going to treat them, you know, make
them seizure free. It's and I think quantum is ideal
for a condition like mine epilepsy, because we are a
(42:33):
rare disease, and I think that benefit that it's going
to have will start with rare diseases, you know, as
I explained earlier, So take any other rare disease. We
should start there and then expand from that to more
complex things like cancer for example, and others. But those
rare conditions where we are left now completely scratching our
(42:57):
heads and going intuition. It will make our care truly precise,
and it will make drug development a more tailored exercise
than the way it is now, where it's like a
hammer that's looking for nails?
Speaker 3 (43:18):
Am I right in thinking that of all of the
over the one hundred year history or more now of
Cleveland clinic, this sounds like the absolute best time to
be a Cleveland clinic.
Speaker 5 (43:26):
Yeah. I love it. No complaints, no complaints, And I
am hiring.
Speaker 7 (43:34):
I need I need those quantum researchers, those people who
are wanting, you know, to apply quant to genetic research,
imaging research, every single aspect of biomedical research.
Speaker 4 (43:49):
We can't afford to just wait on the sideline and
until the technology is ready and then you know, then
it will teach us. It is ready now that twelve
thousand Atham Sam relation wouldn't have happened just a year
and a half ago.
Speaker 5 (44:05):
It's quidinn.
Speaker 3 (44:07):
So the headline of this conversation is we're hiring.
Speaker 5 (44:10):
Yes, Yeah, that's a good headline. We're growing, how about that.
Speaker 3 (44:19):
Smart Talks with IBM is produced by Matt Ramano, Amy Gains, McQuaid,
Trina Menino and Jake Harper. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence,
Mastering by Sarah Buguerer, Music by a Gramoscope, Strategy by
Cassidy Meyer, Sophia Derlon and Tatiana Lieberman. Special thanks to
doctor Laura Jahi, Alicia Real Cooney, and the Cleveland Clinic team.
(44:43):
Smart Talks with IBM is a production of Pushkin Industries
and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to podcasts. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. This is a paid
advertisement for IBM. The conversations on this podcast don't necessarily
(45:03):
represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.
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