David A. Shaywitz, MD, PhD

Entrepreneurial Innovation In Medicine

Last updated: March 10, 2020

Parallel revolutions in molecular biology and digital technology have created profound new opportunities to reconceptualize healthcare and medical discovery, providing us with the tools to refine our understanding of health and disease, and rigorously evaluate and iteratively optimize potential solutions.

Delivering on this promise has proved far more challenging than many originally anticipated.  Both biology and healthcare are enormously complicated, stakeholders are deeply entrenched, and to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, your view of the problem tends to depend a great deal on where you are standing.

Success requires a deep understanding of the existing system – an intuitive appreciation of the real problems to be solved, and the irrepressible determination to deliver an actionable solution.

Topics of recent interest include:

• Challenge of introducing digital and data science into pharma:
  • Atomwise and EQRx: Two Contrasting Strategies for the R&D Inefficiency Problem
  • Sanofi’s New CEO Captures Pharma’s Grounded View of Health Tech
  • New Job, Same Thesis: Aligning Tech & Pharma To Elicit Best of Both
  • Disruption, Fast and Slow
  • Novartis CEO Who Wanted To Bring Tech Into Pharma Now Explains Why It’s So Hard
  • The Digital Dozen: My Twelve Takeaways For HBS on Data, DNA, and Pharma
  • We Need A Miracle – How Drug R&D Needs To Change To Cure Disease (interviewed for Harvard Business School’s “Under The Datascope” podcast)
  • The Sociology Behind Data Silos In Pharma R&D
  • Pharma’s Desperate Struggle To Teach Old Data New Tricks
  • How Big Pharmas Simultaneous Repel and Embrace Innovation
  • What Is A Data Science Mindset — And Does Pharma Really Need One?
  • Is Pharma’s Data Problem Technical Or Cultural?
• Implementation/Diffusion:
  • The Value And Necessity Of Tinkering
  • Techlash Offers Health And Tech Opportunity To Reset Relationship, Rediscover Mutual Respect 
  • Challenging Core Assumptions, Tech Backlash Paves The Way for More Thoughtful HealthTech
  • Understanding The Ideology of Digital Transformation
  • Captivating Moonrise Podcast Highlights Role Of Narrative In Technology Adoption
  • Getting Beyond Hype Vs Hope in Precision Medicine and AI: The Life Cycle Of Technology Revolutions
  • From Durham, The Future of Clinical Research Looks A Lot Like Implementation Science
  • Winning Health Tech Entrepreneurs Will Focus on Implementation, Not Fetishized Invention
  • A Drug Is not an Outcome: Extending Translation Through Implementation Using Real-World Data (Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics 2019)
• AI and its discontents
  • AI Can Help With Repeatable Processes, But Don’t Expect Thunderbolts For Drug Discovery
  • Tech VCs and Biotech VCs: Talking Past Each Other On AI Drug Discovery
  • AI and Healthcare: Is The Bloom Finally Off The Rose?
  • Data Scientist Explains How AI’s Seductive Power Can Mislead Biomarker Researchers
  • AI Doesn’t Ask Why — But Physicians And Drug Developers Want To Know
  • Why AI and Healthcare Must Learn To Play Together
• Organizational Behavior
  • Enough With Culture, Focus On Structure Biotech Entrepreneur Argues
  • We Are Not A Dashboard: Contesting The Tyranny Of Metrics, Measurement, and Managerialism
• Emerging Technologies In Oncology
  • The Engineers Captivating Pharma Make Cells Not Software
  • Cancer Research Meeting Offers Cambrian Explosion Of Biology, Opportunities For Data Science
  • The Lab Tests Behind Immuno-Oncology: Precise Enough?
  • Wall Street Journal review of two I/O books: The Breakthrough and The Beautiful Cure
• Real World Evidence/Data
  • The Deeply Human Core Of Roche’s $2.1B Tech Acquisition – And Why It Made It
  • Beyond Flatiron: The Rising Power Of Oncology Clinical Data Companies
  • Will Real World Performance Replace RCTs As Healthcare’s Most Important Standard?
  • Amy Abernethy: Poised To Propel FDA Into Tech-Savvy, Patient-Centric Future
• Networks
  • Black Swans, Networks, and Covid-19
  • Our Tightly Networked World: Blessing And Curse
  • The Path To Domination (WSJ book review of Levy’s Facebook: The Inside Story)
  • NRDD network view of disease (Nat. Rev. Drug Discov. 2009, with Eric Schadt and Stephen Friend).
  • Shattering The Bell Curve (WSJ book review of Taleb’s Black Swan)
• Advice For Health Tech Entrepreneurs
  • Incrementalism is the new Disruption, Trust is the New Black, and Positive Change (for now) at FDA: Takeaways from the 2020 Precision Medicine World Conference
  • Entering JPM20 With A Grounded, Yet Hopeful, View of Health Tech
  • Are Healthcare Enterprises Buying Silicon Valley’s Evangelistic Sell?
  • Engineering As Translation: What Biomedical Entrepreneurs Can Learn From A Petrol CEO
  • Two Lessons From Two Shoe Guys: What Allbirds Can Teach Health Tech Entrepreneurs
  • Three Design Principles Health Tech Entrepreneurs Could Learn From Picture Framing At Michael’s
  • Digital Medicine: Digital Health Plus Evidence Plus Humility
  • Hard Lessons For Would-Be Health Entrepreneurs From UCSF Expert
  • Learning The Right Lesson From Theranos: Fraud Is Bad, Wanting To Disrupt Healthcare Isn’t
  • Should Tech Entrepreneurs Aspire To Fix Clinical Trials Or Reinvent Them?
  • Why Healthcare Entrepreneurs Developing Devices Or Software Better Grok Sales & Marketing
  • To Translate Medical Science Effectively, Researchers Must Understand Commercialization
• Personal favorites
  • Why Range May This Year’s Most Important Business — and Parenting — Book
  • The Startling History Behind Merck’s New Cancer Blockbuster
  • Beware of Tidy Success Narratives — In Pharma and in Life
  • Life After Twitter
  • What I Learned Losing 80 Pounds In 2018
  • Losing 80 Pounds Was Hard; Keeping Off Was So Much Harder