Semafor World Economy: Flagship Pioneering CEO Noubar Afeyan Talks Health Tech

Good to be here.

Well, I'm going to be joining a panel with Gary Khan from IBM and we're going to talk about how the current moment presents some opportunities and challenges, technologies particularly in my space of healthcare and the changes that are going on and how we can actually compete more effectively.

Well, there's a way that it's affecting every sector and it's also affecting healthcare, which is productivity, simplifying work, making things more efficient. But then there's a unique way in which AI is affecting science which is really completely different territory and that is the whole scientific method is increasingly being leveraged by AI and then leveraging of AI in the sense that we're using generative AI to come up with new hypotheses not one at a time but hundreds of them at a time. We're using AI to design experimental protocols that otherwise hundreds of scientists would be involved in doing and then we're actually running experiments increasingly in automated labs and then interpreting the data. That whole wheel of science that's historically been very important as to its output but very inefficient and slow is becoming AI if I can call it that. And it's really a marvel to see because we don't really know kind of where it goes. It's a little like Waze for scientific discovery to put it in a kind of a trivial way, but it's really potent and we're just beginning to see the effects of that.

Well, so many things I think have contributed to our innovation edge. I'd say first and foremost our immigration policy has been a huge part of that in the sense that we've attracted the best and brightest from the world and we've been able to incent them to stay here and to contribute and that's been a very big driver. I think that the policies that we use in terms of funding basic research that leads to some of the major breakthroughs, there's a whole continuum. People don't realize when they see a breakthrough, when some satellite gets shot up in the sky and does wonderful things, where does that come from? And the answer is a consistent investment in basic research that follows by applied research follows by entrepreneurial research all the way to companies that can create these products. There is a real battle going on as to whether that research is worth it and whether we should just get out of the business of funding scientific research by and large and that's really scary in my view. Then there's competitiveness issues. You know, we're competing with China in certain sectors, particularly in biotechnology, and we definitely are feeling the effects of that because they have a centrally planned economy that's focusing on some areas of relative advantage for them, particularly new drugs that can be developed very efficiently there and the US biotech industry is feeling that. Now competition is good in general because it makes you even better. But competition based on policies that are very different as to what it takes to take something into the clinic and test it in humans or the ability to aggregate data from lots of places so you can make much better decisions, these are things that are essentially not possible in the US. We're not organized that way. So we've been advocating that there needs to be attention paid to some of the conditions for us to maintain our competitive edge. So I think that the challenges bring opportunities. The startup community that's very healthy in the US, we need to make sure we're protecting that advantage. Obviously large companies are also competing. So how do we create the dynamics right to make sure that happens? All of that goes into competitive advantage and innovation.