Moneyball Medicine

Charles Fisher is the founder and CEO at Unlearn, a San Francisco company using purpose-built machine learning algorithms that use historical clinical trial data to create "digital twins" of actual participants in controlled drug trials to help predict how each participant would have fared if they'd been given a placebo. By comparing a patient's actual record to their digital twin, Fisher says, the company can pinpoint the treatment effect at the patient level and conduct trials with fewer placebo patients. Fisher tells Harry that Unlearn's software can help drug companies run clinical trials "twice as fast, using half as many people." Fisher's own history is somewhat unconventional for someone in the pharmaceutical business. He holds a  B.S. in biophysics from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral scientist in biophysics at Boston University and a Philippe Meyer Fellow in theoretical physics at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, then went