(US & Canada) VIDEO | We Want to Make Drug Development Cheaper — Huma.AI Co-founder and CEO

Huma.AI Co-founders Lana Feng, CEO, and Greg Kostello, CTO, speak with Caroline Carruthers, Chief Executive at Carruthers and Jackson, in a video interview featuring the success stories with Huma.AI, its future roadmap, the importance of ethics, and contemplating the future achievements of the generative AI platform.

Huma AI is a self-service business intelligence (BI) platform built for the healthcare industry. Caruthers and Jackson is an end-to-end data consulting solution that helps businesses harness the value of their data.

Feng begins the conversation by sharing some success stories of Huma.AI. She starts with a story of a client in the medical device industry affected by the European Medical Device Regulation (EU-MDR) and In Vitro Diagnostic Regulation (IVDR). According to the regulations, the clients had to monitor thousands of products sold in the European markets.

This became quite a challenge for the companies as 67% of the revenue would be used for post-market surveillance efforts. To overcome this hurdle, Huma.AI implemented AI and other technologies to minimize the effort and shorten the time required for post-market surveillance, says Feng.

This resulted in an increased ability to scale and achieve results. In addition, Feng shares that the industry as a whole is facing resource constraints and is struggling to find enough experts for surveillance. Huma.AI is solving the issue by using technology to save time of 15-20 experts allowing them to do more with fewer resources and meet regulatory timelines.

Building on that, Kostello says that while it is important to address the regulations, from a human aspect, products could harm patients if things went wrong. He adds that the normal evaluation process would take months but with Huma.AI, one can rerun the analysis daily and detect issues rapidly.

Moving forward, Feng talks about being recently included in the 2023 cohort of “Women of Influence” for Silicon Valley Business Journal. The award is of extreme significance to her as a CEO, as it has gotten recognition from organizations like Gartner.

She states that being acknowledged by Gartner as the leader in using Generative AI for this particular complex vertical life sciences is a huge accomplishment.

When asked about the future roadmap of Huma.AI, Feng discusses working on building the sales pipeline and getting customer acceptance. She mentions that it is also about collaborating with clients to build new use cases. With an easy scalability, the goal is to become the de facto generative AI platform, she adds.

The end focus, however, will be on solving data bottlenecks by being able to accelerate the drug development processes and benefiting patients, says Feng.

Delving further, Kostello says that there are going to be some interesting technology inclusions and the roadmap is for over a year. He mentions rolling out a chatbot that will allow multiple people to interact with AI at the same time.

According to Kostello, this will speed up conversations and information sharing. He notes that certain models are good at answering certain questions, hence, the team is working on combining multiple large language models.

In addition, Kostello affirms building something that would allow people to get analytics at their fingertips. He foresees Huma.AI moving in a direction where people can put in different scenarios and put their data to analyze and iterate rapidly to come up with solutions.

Further, Feng adds that Huma.AI will be focusing on partnerships this year, and invites companies looking to broaden their enterprise strategy with generative AI.

When asked about ethics, Feng refers to it as a “massive” topic and mentions OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s testimony in front of the U.S. Congress stating the need for regulation. In accordance, she states that regulation is critical to ethics. Being a player in the field, Feng affirms having a strict code of conduct for helping patients.

The biggest challenge in the case of generative AI, she adds, is that the field is rapidly evolving and whether the regulatory body can move as fast.

According to Kostello, life science brings with it a rich field of ethics. He states that the system must be able to audit and validate every single answer, considering the available misinformation. It is an additional challenge as the systems are taking in the data, however, he maintains that even the source data is validated data, at Huma.AI.

In continuation, Feng poses the question of what if the asked questions generate biases in the models. She states that there is a lot to think about and this pokes her interest.

When asked about the future, Kostello says that 30 years down the line, he would love to say that the platform has been instrumental in finding a cure for cancer and other debilitating diseases. He adds that although people in the US and Europe have access to top-tier healthcare, he would like to see treatments becoming economical in other parts of the world, allowing people to have access to treatment.

In conclusion, Feng states that the goal in 20 years would be, to be a platform that shortens the time frame of developing a drug and making it much cheaper. This would then allow pharma companies to market these drugs at a cheaper rate, benefitting the broad patient population.

CDO Magazine appreciates Lana Feng and Greg Kostello for sharing their insights with our global community.