Moneyball Medicine

This week Harry sits down with Vangelis Vergetis, the co-founder and co-executive director of Intelligencia, a startup that uses big data and machine learning to help pharmaceutical companies make better decisions throughout the drug development process. Vergetis argues that if you put a group of pharma executives in a conference room, then add an extra chair for a machine-learning system, the whole group ends up smarter—and able to make more accurate predictions about which drug candidates will succeed and which will fail.Bringing better analytics into the pharma industry has been an uphill battle, Vergetis says. One survey by McKinsey, his former employer, showed that financial services companies were the most likely to adopt AI and machine learning tools; the least likely were the building and construction trades. But just one rung up from the bottom was healthcare and pharmaceuticals. "The impact that AI could have on health care is "enormous," Vergetis says. "It's in the trillions. But in terms of AI ado