Moneyball Medicine

The discoveries medical researchers and drug developers can make are constrained by the kinds of questions they can ask of their data. Unfortunately, when it comes to clinical trial data, or gene expression data, or population health data, it feels like you need a PhD in computer science just to know which questions are "askable" and how to frame them. This week, Harry talks with the founders of a startup working to solve that problem.Tag.bio aims to make it possible for any worker in the life sciences sector—even if they don't have a PhD in computer science or data science—to interrogate their data quickly and automatically. The idea is to help them uncover trends or connections in their data that would otherwise require months of work and help from a data scientist or a data engineer.The company was founded in 2014 as a spinoff from the University of California, San Francisco Cancer Center. That’s where co-founder Jesse Paquette first invented a system that let oncology researchers ask guided questions of t