This week on BioTech Nation, Dr. Daniel Kraft, Tech Nation Health Chief Correspondent, returns with highlights from the 2025 NextMed Health conference. From AI-powered health agents to voice-based disease detection, hear what’s emerging at the intersection of medicine, technology, and global health equity.
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Episode Transcript
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Dr. Moira Gunn (00:11):
Every year, Tech Nation Health chief
correspondent doctor DanielKraft hosts the NextMed Health
conference, and every year, weask him what he learned. Well,
Daniel, it's so great to seeyou. This has been a busy
spring. I mean, and of course,we're just done with NextMed
Health 2025 in San Diego. Let'stalk about some high notes there
(00:35):
in San Diego.
Dr. Daniel Kraft (00:36):
Yeah. So NextMed Health is a program I've
been curating for more thanthirteen years actually. This is
our program we started in SanDiego in the Hotel del Coronado
in 2013 where each year we bringtogether an amazing community to
look at the future of health andmedicine at this sort of super
convergence of technologies, notjust AI or medical devices or
(01:00):
pharma or nanotech or biotechbut bringing people together to
kind of get a taste of what'snow, what's near to happening,
and what's coming next, andwhat's needed to really catalyze
the future of health andmedicine. And this year we had
over 70 faculty and 25 sessions,so we really covered a lot about
what's on the cutting edge andhelped people sort of catalyze
(01:22):
the future of health andmedicine.
Dr. Moira Gunn (01:24):
Well, I'm gonna ask you about one person that I
thought was absolutelybrilliant. And, of course, name
is Larry Brilliant. Let's talkabout that. He was in several
sessions, but let's focus on hismessage.
Dr. Daniel Kraft (01:36):
Well, Doctor. Brilliant, who's, if you're not
aware, is a famedepidemiologist. He played a key
role in helping eradicatesmallpox in the 1970s with the
WHO. He later ran google.org. Hehelped co found Seva, which has
helped with blindness formillions of folks around the
planet.
We sort of asked Larry, as sucha bit of a sage, to kind of give
(01:56):
us perspectives on how do wemeet this current moment. It's
no secret that right now in thefew months of 2025, health and
medicine and public health are abit under threat from challenges
to NIH budget, to USAID, to WHO.And Larry sort of gave us a bit
of the perspective. Seem likewe're in difficult times, we've
(02:17):
had worse times, the CubanMissile Crisis, World War II,
and how do you sort of do welland do good in times that are
challenging? And he sort ofchallenged us all to do, you
know, something that helpssomebody who's less capable or
or lucky as we are as we try andmake changes going forward.
But also the perspective oftaking the long view and how do
(02:39):
we kind of learn to crosscollaborate in challenging times
because often it's thechallenging windows that
catalyze the future inunexpected and hopefully
positive ways. And so, you know,the next med health context,
wanted to have the perspectiveof history, but also how do you
shape the future in in reallyempowering ways with the with
our sort of core aim of how dowe democratize health and
(03:02):
medicine around the planet andmake health more health more
accessible and more equitable,whether it's rural California or
rural Rwanda? And and LarryBrilliant, gave a great sort of
lessons in in how to think aboutthat future and how to even have
perspective on our challengingtimes.
Dr. Moira Gunn (03:18):
Well, I have to say that I was especially moved
when he talked about what it waslike before vaccines. We kind of
forgot about that. And we werealso our expectations were
modified given that, Oh, we hada COVID vaccine in a year. So
it's pretty easy. It's not easy.
Dr. Daniel Kraft (03:40):
It's not easy. And also we sometimes have short
memories. Doctor. Brilliant madethe point that in the last
century, fifty million peopledied of smallpox. Now it's
eradicated.
You know, fifty years ago peoplewere in iron lungs from polio.
Now we have very few cases ofpolio, but with the changes in
perception and some of the antiscience and anti vaxx movement
(04:02):
in the last few months we'reseeing the deaths of measles
here in The United States,something hugely preventable.
And so we need to understandthat our massive impacts on
health span and lifespan arelargely thanks to public health
and we need to be notwithdrawing from that but
enhancing our systems to bothyou know prevent diseases using
(04:24):
vaccines and other measures butalso to think proactively about
how do we design and optimizehealth span for all of us.
Dr. Moira Gunn (04:32):
Well I have to say you had to do AI.
Dr. Daniel Kraft (04:35):
AI or I'd to call it more IA, as you've heard
me say before, more intelligenceaugmentation. But of course a
through line from NextMed Healththis year was all the ways that
AI, which is moving so quicklywhere you can sort of load up
your protein and potentiallyfind understand how it folds and
how you might identifyparticular drugs and molecules
that might act as drug againstthose sort of targets. So we're
(04:58):
really starting to speed up theability to, not in the old ways
of screening thousands ofmolecules, but design the
molecules using AI machinelearning that might fit a
particular protein or mechanismto start to cure diseases, in
much faster and personalized andprecise ways. So that's a bit of
a through line, but what Ithought was most interesting is
now the ways that AI is enablingus to take all these new omics
(05:21):
sets, right? It's not just thegenome, it's now the metabolome
from a continuous glucosemonitor.
It might be the low costproteome, it could be your
sociome data, your digitome datafrom your smartwatches and
wearables, and how we're able tostart to put those together and
be empowered. And one of myfavorite talks was by he's a
technologist turned patientnamed Steven Brown, and Steve,
(05:43):
had been in the med tech spacetwenty years ago, and got back
into it recently because,unfortunately he was diagnosed
with multiple myeloma. He sharedthe story of being diagnosed
with myeloma and how long ittook for him to get diagnosed
even though the doctors had hislabs. He built his own sort of
health agent, he's a superprogrammer and AI expert. He
built sort of an Hippocrates andalso his own virtual
(06:05):
hematologist and cardiologistwho looked at his data from
before he was diagnosed andsaid, of course you should get a
bone marrow and this looksconcerning for a malignancy in
the marrow.
And just as an example ofentering this age where you're
gonna be interact with differentagents of different specialties,
it could be the overall masterclinician like Hippocrates, it
could be a nutritionist, couldbe a workout coach that's gonna
(06:27):
interact with you as a verysmart agent, can leverage all
these new LLMs, large languagemodels from multiple sources,
and really give you a new levelof interaction. We're not
waiting months to see thespecialists, and will enable all
of us to be much more proactiveand engaged in our health. And
where I think that's gonna headin the next couple years is
we'll all have our own sort ofself agents tuned to our age,
(06:49):
our culture, our personality. Ilike to call them sort of
generative health. And thesewill be super tuned and they'll
hopefully be proactive andpreventative and keep you on
track to a long lifespan andhealth span, but also when you
do have a disease we'll be ableto sift through the data and
pick it up early proactively andthen guide you and your clinical
teams to make the smartest, mostpersonalized health
(07:10):
recommendations whether it's forsomething really challenging
like myeloma or something ascommon as a sprained ankle.
So really interesting ways thatwe can start to bring massive
data to insights to somethingyou can use in action on
yourself.
Dr. Moira Gunn (07:22):
And what I like about this is the idea of plug
and play. Like, well, I'm reallyconcerned about my voice and
whether for me, there's a lot ofrecordings in my voice. You
could tell the differencebetween it now and it thirty
years ago if you wanted. But theidea that you could decide that
in your in your everyday lifeabout what you want checked with
(07:46):
the intelligence that's nowbehind it.
Dr. Daniel Kraft (07:48):
Right. And that can almost be seamless. The
things you've just mentioned,your voice is being recorded all
the time whether you want to onyour smartphone or on a podcast.
And we actually had a greatsession led by the team at Click
Labs where they just recentlypublished that the sound of your
voice, the voice is a biomarker,they've been able to leverage to
predict who has diabetes, whohas early pre diabetes because
(08:10):
of high blood sugar or mighteven have diabetes and not know
they have it, just based on theAI analysis of your voice.
They're also doing similar workwhere their voice can predict if
you have high blood pressure.
And also other folks have shownthat voice biomarkers can
predict early signs ofneurologic disorders like ALS,
Lou Gehrig's disease, or earlyforms of Parkinson's. So that's
(08:31):
something that we're collectingubiquitously and can be used for
proactive early detection.Another example you talked about
gait. Well, our smartwatches,smart rings, our our Fitbits to
beyond actually able to look atyour gait and see subtle
changes. In fact, on someplatforms it can tell you if
you're likely to have weaknessin one leg or likely to have a
(08:52):
fall.
And so there's even this idea ofmobility as a new vital sign,
which really correlates tohealth span, risk of a fall,
breaking a hip for example. Andso those are small examples of
small data collected ininteresting ways when you put
them together in context, willstart to give us our sort of
health agents that will give usproactive warning and early
intervention.
Dr. Moira Gunn (09:12):
It seems to me that you have a video of some of
the people who were speakingonline, isn't that right?
Dr. Daniel Kraft (09:20):
Yes. If you go to nextmed.health and you look
under videos, you can see ourcatalog of a lot of the talks
from our prior NextBends. We'restarting to put up put up some
of the new talks every week fromthis year's. It's a great place
to get up to speed on all thethings that are happening that
are impacting health care.Again, not just the high-tech,
but we leverage in designthinking and creativity, the
(09:42):
sort of social determinants ofhealth, health access and
equity.
We had Doctor. Yomi, who's aphysician from Nigeria, who
brought the sort of lesson ofyou don't wanna just drop off a
technology in Africa and saygood luck. You wanna teach the
folks there how to innovate andleverage and come up with their
own solutions, often leveragingtechnologies. And in many cases,
these technologies areleapfrogging what can happen in
(10:04):
The United States and let's sayEurope, they can go to Africa,
can go to India and beimplemented. A small example is
a company called Jivi dot aiwhich is an AI doctor in your
pocket launched in India,available here now where you can
talk to it in Hindi or Farsi orFrench and you'll have an AI
clinician sense that can helptriage you.
(10:24):
It also can be a health coachfor your nutrition, it also uses
the camera to track your vitalsigns. These are things that are
often going to places wherethere almost is no doctor
available, and it's gonna startto help democratize care around
the planet.
Dr. Moira Gunn (10:37):
Nextmed. Health. And hopefully, you'll stay
healthy. I'll see you next week.
Dr. Daniel Kraft (10:41):
See you. Stay healthy.
Dr. Moira Gunn (10:43):
Tech Nation Health chief correspondent
doctor Daniel Kraft is thefounder and chair of NextMed
Health on the web atnextmed.health and
digital.health. More informationabout Daniel at danielcraft m d
dot net.
Every year, Tech Nation Health chief
correspondent doctor DanielKraft hosts the NextMed Health
conference, and every year, weask him what he learned. Well,
Daniel, it's so great to seeyou. This has been a busy
spring. I mean, and of course,we're just done with NextMed
Health 2025 in San Diego. Let'stalk about some high notes there
(00:35):
in San Diego.
Dr. Daniel Kraft (00:36):
Yeah. So NextMed Health is a program I've
been curating for more thanthirteen years actually. This is
our program we started in SanDiego in the Hotel del Coronado
in 2013 where each year we bringtogether an amazing community to
look at the future of health andmedicine at this sort of super
convergence of technologies, notjust AI or medical devices or
(01:00):
pharma or nanotech or biotechbut bringing people together to
kind of get a taste of what'snow, what's near to happening,
and what's coming next, andwhat's needed to really catalyze
the future of health andmedicine. And this year we had
over 70 faculty and 25 sessions,so we really covered a lot about
what's on the cutting edge andhelped people sort of catalyze
(01:22):
the future of health andmedicine.
Dr. Moira Gunn (01:24):
Well, I'm gonna ask you about one person that I
thought was absolutelybrilliant. And, of course, name
is Larry Brilliant. Let's talkabout that. He was in several
sessions, but let's focus on hismessage.
Dr. Daniel Kraft (01:36):
Well, Doctor. Brilliant, who's, if you're not
aware, is a famedepidemiologist. He played a key
role in helping eradicatesmallpox in the 1970s with the
WHO. He later ran google.org. Hehelped co found Seva, which has
helped with blindness formillions of folks around the
planet.
We sort of asked Larry, as sucha bit of a sage, to kind of give
(01:56):
us perspectives on how do wemeet this current moment. It's
no secret that right now in thefew months of 2025, health and
medicine and public health are abit under threat from challenges
to NIH budget, to USAID, to WHO.And Larry sort of gave us a bit
of the perspective. Seem likewe're in difficult times, we've
(02:17):
had worse times, the CubanMissile Crisis, World War II,
and how do you sort of do welland do good in times that are
challenging? And he sort ofchallenged us all to do, you
know, something that helpssomebody who's less capable or
or lucky as we are as we try andmake changes going forward.
But also the perspective oftaking the long view and how do
(02:39):
we kind of learn to crosscollaborate in challenging times
because often it's thechallenging windows that
catalyze the future inunexpected and hopefully
positive ways. And so, you know,the next med health context,
wanted to have the perspectiveof history, but also how do you
shape the future in in reallyempowering ways with the with
our sort of core aim of how dowe democratize health and
(03:02):
medicine around the planet andmake health more health more
accessible and more equitable,whether it's rural California or
rural Rwanda? And and LarryBrilliant, gave a great sort of
lessons in in how to think aboutthat future and how to even have
perspective on our challengingtimes.
Dr. Moira Gunn (03:18):
Well, I have to say that I was especially moved
when he talked about what it waslike before vaccines. We kind of
forgot about that. And we werealso our expectations were
modified given that, Oh, we hada COVID vaccine in a year. So
it's pretty easy. It's not easy.
Dr. Daniel Kraft (03:40):
It's not easy. And also we sometimes have short
memories. Doctor. Brilliant madethe point that in the last
century, fifty million peopledied of smallpox. Now it's
eradicated.
You know, fifty years ago peoplewere in iron lungs from polio.
Now we have very few cases ofpolio, but with the changes in
perception and some of the antiscience and anti vaxx movement
(04:02):
in the last few months we'reseeing the deaths of measles
here in The United States,something hugely preventable.
And so we need to understandthat our massive impacts on
health span and lifespan arelargely thanks to public health
and we need to be notwithdrawing from that but
enhancing our systems to bothyou know prevent diseases using
(04:24):
vaccines and other measures butalso to think proactively about
how do we design and optimizehealth span for all of us.
Dr. Moira Gunn (04:32):
Well I have to say you had to do AI.
Dr. Daniel Kraft (04:35):
AI or I'd to call it more IA, as you've heard
me say before, more intelligenceaugmentation. But of course a
through line from NextMed Healththis year was all the ways that
AI, which is moving so quicklywhere you can sort of load up
your protein and potentiallyfind understand how it folds and
how you might identifyparticular drugs and molecules
that might act as drug againstthose sort of targets. So we're
(04:58):
really starting to speed up theability to, not in the old ways
of screening thousands ofmolecules, but design the
molecules using AI machinelearning that might fit a
particular protein or mechanismto start to cure diseases, in
much faster and personalized andprecise ways. So that's a bit of
a through line, but what Ithought was most interesting is
now the ways that AI is enablingus to take all these new omics
(05:21):
sets, right? It's not just thegenome, it's now the metabolome
from a continuous glucosemonitor.
It might be the low costproteome, it could be your
sociome data, your digitome datafrom your smartwatches and
wearables, and how we're able tostart to put those together and
be empowered. And one of myfavorite talks was by he's a
technologist turned patientnamed Steven Brown, and Steve,
(05:43):
had been in the med tech spacetwenty years ago, and got back
into it recently because,unfortunately he was diagnosed
with multiple myeloma. He sharedthe story of being diagnosed
with myeloma and how long ittook for him to get diagnosed
even though the doctors had hislabs. He built his own sort of
health agent, he's a superprogrammer and AI expert. He
built sort of an Hippocrates andalso his own virtual
(06:05):
hematologist and cardiologistwho looked at his data from
before he was diagnosed andsaid, of course you should get a
bone marrow and this looksconcerning for a malignancy in
the marrow.
And just as an example ofentering this age where you're
gonna be interact with differentagents of different specialties,
it could be the overall masterclinician like Hippocrates, it
could be a nutritionist, couldbe a workout coach that's gonna
(06:27):
interact with you as a verysmart agent, can leverage all
these new LLMs, large languagemodels from multiple sources,
and really give you a new levelof interaction. We're not
waiting months to see thespecialists, and will enable all
of us to be much more proactiveand engaged in our health. And
where I think that's gonna headin the next couple years is
we'll all have our own sort ofself agents tuned to our age,
(06:49):
our culture, our personality. Ilike to call them sort of
generative health. And thesewill be super tuned and they'll
hopefully be proactive andpreventative and keep you on
track to a long lifespan andhealth span, but also when you
do have a disease we'll be ableto sift through the data and
pick it up early proactively andthen guide you and your clinical
teams to make the smartest, mostpersonalized health
(07:10):
recommendations whether it's forsomething really challenging
like myeloma or something ascommon as a sprained ankle.
So really interesting ways thatwe can start to bring massive
data to insights to somethingyou can use in action on
yourself.
Dr. Moira Gunn (07:22):
And what I like about this is the idea of plug
and play. Like, well, I'm reallyconcerned about my voice and
whether for me, there's a lot ofrecordings in my voice. You
could tell the differencebetween it now and it thirty
years ago if you wanted. But theidea that you could decide that
in your in your everyday lifeabout what you want checked with
(07:46):
the intelligence that's nowbehind it.
Dr. Daniel Kraft (07:48):
Right. And that can almost be seamless. The
things you've just mentioned,your voice is being recorded all
the time whether you want to onyour smartphone or on a podcast.
And we actually had a greatsession led by the team at Click
Labs where they just recentlypublished that the sound of your
voice, the voice is a biomarker,they've been able to leverage to
predict who has diabetes, whohas early pre diabetes because
(08:10):
of high blood sugar or mighteven have diabetes and not know
they have it, just based on theAI analysis of your voice.
They're also doing similar workwhere their voice can predict if
you have high blood pressure.
And also other folks have shownthat voice biomarkers can
predict early signs ofneurologic disorders like ALS,
Lou Gehrig's disease, or earlyforms of Parkinson's. So that's
(08:31):
something that we're collectingubiquitously and can be used for
proactive early detection.Another example you talked about
gait. Well, our smartwatches,smart rings, our our Fitbits to
beyond actually able to look atyour gait and see subtle
changes. In fact, on someplatforms it can tell you if
you're likely to have weaknessin one leg or likely to have a
(08:52):
fall.
And so there's even this idea ofmobility as a new vital sign,
which really correlates tohealth span, risk of a fall,
breaking a hip for example. Andso those are small examples of
small data collected ininteresting ways when you put
them together in context, willstart to give us our sort of
health agents that will give usproactive warning and early
intervention.
Dr. Moira Gunn (09:12):
It seems to me that you have a video of some of
the people who were speakingonline, isn't that right?
Dr. Daniel Kraft (09:20):
Yes. If you go to nextmed.health and you look
under videos, you can see ourcatalog of a lot of the talks
from our prior NextBends. We'restarting to put up put up some
of the new talks every week fromthis year's. It's a great place
to get up to speed on all thethings that are happening that
are impacting health care.Again, not just the high-tech,
but we leverage in designthinking and creativity, the
(09:42):
sort of social determinants ofhealth, health access and
equity.
We had Doctor. Yomi, who's aphysician from Nigeria, who
brought the sort of lesson ofyou don't wanna just drop off a
technology in Africa and saygood luck. You wanna teach the
folks there how to innovate andleverage and come up with their
own solutions, often leveragingtechnologies. And in many cases,
these technologies areleapfrogging what can happen in
(10:04):
The United States and let's sayEurope, they can go to Africa,
can go to India and beimplemented. A small example is
a company called Jivi dot aiwhich is an AI doctor in your
pocket launched in India,available here now where you can
talk to it in Hindi or Farsi orFrench and you'll have an AI
clinician sense that can helptriage you.
(10:24):
It also can be a health coachfor your nutrition, it also uses
the camera to track your vitalsigns. These are things that are
often going to places wherethere almost is no doctor
available, and it's gonna startto help democratize care around
the planet.
Dr. Moira Gunn (10:37):
Nextmed. Health. And hopefully, you'll stay
healthy. I'll see you next week.
Dr. Daniel Kraft (10:41):
See you. Stay healthy.
Dr. Moira Gunn (10:43):
Tech Nation Health chief correspondent
doctor Daniel Kraft is thefounder and chair of NextMed
Health on the web atnextmed.health and
digital.health. More informationabout Daniel at danielcraft m d
dot net.
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