Luca Venza  0:00  

Hello, good morning. Welcome back, everyone, please come in and take your seats. There are some free seats up front. Good morning. So just as a show of hands, how many of you were with us yesterday? Okay, great. That's about half. Fantastic. So this morning, we have a fantastic panel. And this is really going to be the first time we've talked exclusively about healthcare. So yesterday, we talked a lot about industry, large industry projects, and applying advanced materials into industry. We talked a lot about connectivity, and the importance of conductivity, but we didn't really dive deep into the human body. And so the panel that I have in front of me today, are really extraordinary visionaries in their respective fields. They're all working with highly advanced applications of advanced materials, advanced processes, that will really lead to the future of medicine. So let me just introduce very quickly, everyone. So Carolina Aguilar to my left, Carolina is the CEO of INBRAIN, which is applying advanced materials into your brain for medical, let's say reparation and medical benefits, Dr. Paul Weiss, he’s the UC presidential chair, he's got so many credentials here, I'm just gonna read a few, a distinguished professor of chemistry, biochemistry, material sciences and engineering from UCLA,  Dr. Deji Akinwande, who's a professor at UT Austin, and is a specialist in bio measurements, so lots of sensors outside of your body, and Dr. Antonio de Lacy, who is really a visionary in the field of remote medicine, so how do we improve the health of the world's population from a distance. And he's already doing some very exciting things in this field. So just to kick us off, I want to give each one of you just maybe two minutes, we've got a clock in front of us. So self vigilance here, but just two minutes, give us a quick update on what you are doing right now, that's very exciting? And then and then we'll kind of jump into the future? 

Carolina Aguilar  2:18  

Sure. Hi. Yes. So INBRAIN is using graphene, which is a 3D material that has very unique properties, when it comes to miniaturization, for instance, which is very important for medtech, and medicine in general. Charge injection, so the capacity to actually induce a bio-stimulation effect in order to activate those neurons that we want to modulate, but also record at a very high fidelity. Actually, what is done today is done with metals with platinum palladium, which are very hard to militarize, but also they have a very high signal to noise ratio and therefore we cannot read exactly which sub the brain. So graphene solves these questions. The brain is the most unknown organ that we have in the body, maybe 10% of what we know. And graphene will help us with these properties to understand better those circuits, to understand how the neurons communicate, what kind of neurons, and therefore be able to modulate and create outcomes that matter to patients and empower patients with a digital connectivity that we can also do thanks to graphene in a much, let's say simplify weight with modern electronics.

Luca Venza  3:39  

So, so great. So for the non medical people, how many people in the room come from medicine? Okay, most of them not. So what does that mean? So how does that affect a patient? What is this going to do for them today? Let's say this year, how’s that gonna really help them.

Carolina Aguilar  3:57  

So let's talk about a case of Parkinson's disease. So there is an imbalance of neurotransmitters in the brain. It is actually very much unknown how the secrets interact with that disease. I mean, we know the basics. We know that nigrostriatal pathway, we know dopamine, we know the basics, but we actually don't know how these neurons actually connect or disconnect to actually keep that patient with control movements. So what graphene can do is we can go into the nucleus, which is part of the basal ganglia where some of these mechanisms actually happen or deteriorate in some cases. And with very high resolution we can understand which biomarkers for that particular patient are causing those symptoms. So graphene, and it's very tiny micrometer graphene dots we call the, can record those frequencies for instance, can record beat advance and beat advanced usually correlate with rigidity. So by reading those signals, we can actually create a bio-electric modulation of that circuit, that is going to reestablish the motor function of that particular patient. And with some machine learning algorithms, we not only close the loop, so reading and then modulating, but we can also predict what's going to happen to that patient in the next hours. So we can tell the patient, okay, your best is going to be from nine to 12 in the morning, and it's a sunny day, go on profits, make your working goals, right. So we can empower patients to take care of their own disease, while also connecting with the physicians and create risk stratification strategies for them to take better care of that particular patient at that particular moment.

Luca Venza  5:51  

So it sounds like diagnostic, primarily, information for better, let's say, quality of life in terms of planning. Is there also a treatment element there? Is there a way to reduce tremor? I mean, we all know Parkinson's patients have tremors, unfortunately I have this in my own family. Can you reduce tremors? Can you control movements?

Carolina Aguilar  6:12  

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the beauty of bidirectional interfaces. So many interfaces that are out there that are up and coming with new materials have very good properties for recording, but recording is diagnostic. It's only when you simulate, or you use that recording through a computer for regular computer interfacing, where you can create a therapy and thanks to graphene, we can actually do both. So it reads in very high resolution, and also stimulates in a much more efficient way than other materials. So we can also develop various small batteries, or various small systems that actually are going towards the more partially invasive or minimally invasive.

Luca Venza  6:54  

Fantastic, thank you so much. That's really exciting to know, it's a little scary, but we'll get to that in a minute. So Deji, I think you are sort of the master of biometric measurement monitoring. Why don't we go over to you Deji, and tell us a little bit about what you're working on?

Deji Akinwande  7:10  

I will thank you very much. I don't think I'm a master, we're all learning. So we're working on developing wearable platforms based on nanomaterials to monitor and record the vital signs of individuals. So I would say part of the ultimate goal is to have continuous wearable platforms, so that you can obtain massive amounts of data. And when you can obtain massive amounts of data about, for example, the respiration rate, the heart rate, the body temperature, electrophysiological data, blood pressure, if you can get this over a length of time when an individual is eating, doing daily activities, running, walking, talking to their friends, sleeping, all of this, then you can deploy this data for machine learning, and begin to now correlate this for personalized medicine and for preventative medicine. So all of the key thing is to obtain massive amounts of data, not the limited data that you get, when you go to visit the doctor, maybe once a year, that is never going to be enough to build the personalized information about your medical state. So this is what we're doing as engineers.

Luca Venza  8:29  

And what are the advances in the last year? I mean, I know for a long time, there's lots of biometric devices, probably many people in the room are wearing something that's telling them about steps or heart rate, but blood pressure, right, blood pressure was maybe is sort of a holy grail, it's very hard to measure blood pressure from outside. Have we made progress there? What other things can we measure today, that maybe we couldn't do a year ago or two years ago?

Deji Akinwande  8:55  

Yes. So it's good that you mentioned blood pressure. Blood pressure is the most important vital sign because it connects to all your organs. And indeed, today, you can buy wearables that have advanced, I would say mobile health, but the challenge with a lot of the wearables today, and there is no wearable that can do blood pressure, and the challenge is that a lot of the wearables do not provide clinically accurate data. So they are more to give you guidance, in general. And what we have today, for example, with blood pressure, at least in the academic lab, we actually have a paper coming out on this, where you can now use wearables like graphene, electronic sensors on the skin to get clinically accurate data. But all of that data was enabled, because we're able to obtain massive amounts from an individual in order to develop a machine learning algorithm that could reach the level of accuracy needed. So the more data you have the more accurate the data becomes in terms of clinical relevance.

Luca Venza  10:05  

That's great. And we'll come back to the data question because I want to talk to Dr. de Lacy now, but we'll come back to the data question in terms of, do you know what you're doing with the data? You know, this is my question, but we'll come back to that. So now that we have good diagnostics, we know what's going on maybe in your brain a little bit, we can monitor that we know what's going on outside your body. So Dr. de Lacy is the one diving in, quite literally, to the body to do something about it. So why don't you tell everyone at home what AIS channel is about and what you guys are up to.

Antonio de Lacy  10:40  

I think my mission in the next 10 years will be to have knowledge in fashion to be hybrid. I want to be more important in education, education in surgery is very complicated. To be an expert in different kinds of super speciality is in surgery, maybe takes 10, 12 or even 20 or 25 years. Now with our platform, we try to reduce the learning curve from five years to one, etc. And we have many different things. One thing is we're using artificial intelligence, we're using robotic surgery, we’re trying to work with both of you, because maybe the graphene, I'm absolutely in favor, I know there are people who are not against this, I have all my information put in here, and I have all you know, the skills of a private surgeon with 40 years experience. That will be easier, probably. Not to control people is to have better service for our patients. Because that is the most important part of our life. It’s not to be here talking about it, but to heal and treat patients. The second thing is more complicated, because I'm very happy because the majority of Barcelona is behind us or with us. And I tried to convince, I don't know, in which city, Madrid now is a very good city, but maybe a new city or at UCLA, is to create the new hospitals. New hospitals, you know, is another different thing. You can buy an apartment 150 square meters in a good neighborhood, and you can move to another apartment 230 meters, but the same four rooms are bigger, but the same. I'm not talking that, I am talking about a modular hospital. And that is like when you're young, you need a loft. When you have kids, you need three rooms. When the kids go to Switzerland to study, you probably are alone with your wife or your husband, and you only meet again, and that means you're coming from a loft and when you're finished you may be in same loft that is similar. Thanks to COVID we learned a lot. When you play a software and cancer is one of the most difficult digestive operations, you send the patient to intensive care. That, let me say, is ridiculous. Why? Because normally, the first hours in the intensive care, the patient is absolutely well, no problem. The problem is two days or three days after. And there is a reason because we sent 12 hours in the intensive care unit and then we sent them to the normal world and the normal words arrived, and we realized the patient is not good, too late. There is a reason because these guys are very important to us. We have everything and now we send the patients immediately after operation, not to the hospital to their houses. And that is the ideal thing. And that's something I don't know we can discuss about that. But I think for me, education is very important. But maybe the first thing is to educate politicians and physicians.

Luca Venza  14:34  

Well, and it's a lot easier to do that if you can monitor what's going on. Right? You feel more comfortable sending them home. You can get the same level of data. And Paul, I mean, let's jump over to you. I think we're talking a lot about graphene up here but you may have a broader perspective on more materials. What are you doing at UCLA? How do you see how much sensoring is a good amount of sensoring?

Paul Weiss  14:58  

Okay, well thank you very much. So, one of the capabilities that our group has developed over the years is to add the chemical dimension to lithography and I'm a nano scientist. And it turns out the nanoscale is the scale of function in biology. So we have this natural connection, both to measure and also to control under the right circumstances. So we've applied that really in three different areas. One is sensors, where we've made under the leadership of my colleague, collaborator and wife, sensors for the brain to listen in on chemical communication, to try to understand what a thought is, what a memory is, the difference between function and malfunction and healthy versus diseased brains, which are really animal models of disease, they don't go in humans. Currently, we can use that same technology for biomarkers for instance, to have a sensor for phenol, alanine. So phenol good neurotics can have something equivalent to the glucose sensors that diabetics have. We use those for measuring single base variations in DNA and RNA, whether it's in your genetics or in a tumor that's mutating. And in that way, we can follow how effective chemotherapy is on a heterogeneous tumor. We also do capture of a cell's exosomes that are sloughed off of tumors to follow metastasis. And again, to follow the effectiveness of treatments, we can do the same thing with viruses using these technologies. In another area, we control what will basically be implanted into a body or used as a barrier for tissue engineering. It also turns out it works in cellular agriculture, growing fish and meat that we heard about yesterday. It's just in those experiments, we eat them and in human muscle regeneration, we don't.

Luca Venza  16:55  

So a thin line between vegetarian and cannibal, right?

Paul Weiss  17:00  

Yes, indeed, yes, exactly the same scaffolds. And, you know, they're totally biocompatible, so they can go in us, but they also give us flavor, you know, if we’re trying to grow something. And then the third area that we saw an opportunity was in high throughput gene editing. So we use a lot of the techniques that have been developed, like CRISPR cast nine, but instead of using viruses for treatment, where the costs are $500,000 to $2 million per dose. And for instance, for sickle cell disease, they're 300,000 patients a year, and you risk giving the patient an off target cancer. So it's not a general solution, both medically and economically. We came up with a safe, very efficient ways to do that, to accomplish those cellular therapies in an hour, while the patient is in the office, rather than, you know, sending their stem cells off for a few months to an overloaded facility, and getting them back and not having to meet specs so that they're, you know, Hematologist or Oncologist has to sign a thing saying I'm going to use it anyway. And those same, you know, the same technologies work for cancer immunotherapy. So we're trying to basically democratize the, you know, the ability to do that, you know, very much as we heard, to get away from having to do that at real specialty medical centers, and put it in the hands of clinicians around the world, including the developing world. We've tried to make it so that, you know, we could have a very usable, low cost method where, you know, sickle cell leads to 10 year expected lifetime in the developing world, as opposed to about 40 in the developed world, so we can improve in one, you know, in one treatment, you know, quality and length of life.

Luca Venza  18:47  

That's fascinating, a lot of what you're talking about, Paul sounds very research oriented, right? Where it's data gathering, and everyone sort of addresses we're just gathering data gathering data gathering data. Now, let's maybe project out a little bit like what happens with all this data in a 5 to 10 year window.

Paul Weiss  19:06  

Okay, so actually, I'll take issue with what you said. One of the nice things about UCLA and unique, I think, is that around one courtyard, we have all of science, engineering and medicine. So while I have no medical training, I train MDs and MD PhDs in my group, we work with people who do bone marrow transplants very closely. So instead of, you know, developing our tools to publish papers, we develop them to get into patients. So we're working, for instance, with the transplant lead, who was the one who cured severe combined immune deficiency, Bubble Boy disease. He has the payload already for sickle cell, he has FDA approval to go into humans and as long as we show that we're at least as safe and at least as efficient, then we can use his approval to get to patients. So it's a very strong driving force and the design of every action experiment, every technology is safe from the start to be able to go all the way to patients. And so we keep that in mind. And we use our medical trainees to do reconnaissance for us. Every time they go on their rounds, they're looking for a patient saying, well, if I only had this diagnostic, or if I only had, you know, this treatment, then I could take care of, you know, I could tear take care of these patients. And we see some low hanging fruit. So for instance, it's easy to get in the eye. And we have one of the top two eye institutes in in the US, the head of research lives right across the street from me, and we've spent almost every Saturday night over COVID, pouring wine, you know, sort of across the sidewalk, and talking about what we might do and what genetic diseases of the eye there are, which layers are accessible using our technologies. And then, you know, we've gone into the lab to develop those together.

Luca Venza  20:57  

That's incredible. And we have two examples, sort of, you know, in INBRAIN and in AI. What are the mechanisms to get that from the data of the research, the clinical study out into the market and maybe come back to Carolina. So your first of all, maybe a quick word on what are the challenges of getting that out of the lab? And then and then maybe project for us, we've got graphene in the brain now, you know, we have its initial purpose, but what is possible 10 years out? How can you see this evolving?

Carolina Aguilar  21:29  

Yeah. So I mean, we are at the beginning, and the journey to health is a long one. Because safety is the thing we must guarantee. And we are learning, right? So the first thing is to work the right steps and do the right things for the patients. And this is what we are doing. And luckily, there's a lot of regulation around it. Probably, it could be better if we will work together with regulatory agencies and they could learn with us. And you know, some things could be faster for sure some things just need that time. I think ethics are a big question mark that we all need to get around. My good friend, neurosurgeon Marwan Harris, from UC London, used to say common sense is the least common of the senses. So while we think that everything makes perfect sense, there's a lot of diversity in thoughts about how all these technologies should be used. So someone needs to put in writing what is the right way. And how can we work together to mainly offer safety and health, that's our INBRAIN purpose. We are not enhancing the brain, we are restoring the brain, we are restoring the connectivity of the human to their natural world. And when it comes to exciting opportunities, as I said, I think there's 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections. Our objective is to understand all that as much as we can. So make a leap frog step into the innovation of understanding the brain, and being able to offer this unique new chances to patients. I mean, when I used to work in Medtronic, people that will carry for instance, a technology called the break summation, will tell me, girl, I have two birthdays, the day I was born, and the day I received this therapy, and that stuck with me all my life. So giving these second chances to people, and hopefully restore Alzheimer's and depression, and those big questions, would be what I think graphene could give us an opportunity. But of course, there is a lot of work between that and where we are. So that's the exciting journey and the contribution we want to make.

Luca Venza  23:58  

And on that point because you said it very elegantly. But it's a really profound conversation, we don't look at ourselves as enhancing. We look at ourselves as repairing. Is that a conscious business decision, is that in a mission statement, is that an unspoken understanding, like how do you land that really in a concept?

Carolina Aguilar  24:22  

Our mission is decoding brain and nerve signals because we also have an opportunity with Merck to look at the peripheral nervous system. So not only the central nervous system at the end is decoding the nervous system to provide medical solutions. So we are always going to stay in the medical field to restoring the body. Because yeah, because it's our values around that.

Luca Venza  24:48  

That's great. And Dr. Deji, I want to jump back to you because I don't want people to leave the room without your vision of the future of robotics and surgery. I think it's an important one to transmit. I think it's a fantastic perspective. So coming to this point, how far do we go with remote surgery? What can we do? What do you envision 10 years out as being possible? And maybe this ethical question. So who's responsible, if things go wrong? What is the discussion around that?

Antonio de Lacy  25:19  

Starting with the last point that is not really really important because when you are doing something in remote surgery or in collaboration, invited to another hospital, you work together in litigation etc, I think it’s not the main problem. The main problem is to define exactly what is going on in 10 years because let me say it is like a dream. And I think when you imagine, I love very much movies, you know, in the majority cinema, you know, is in advance everything is happened after, even in surgery, you see robotic you see I don't know a Skynet from you remember the movie, it's supposed to be horrible thing, and I think it's in the in the way of robotics is Skynet is the movies more than 30 years, maybe more. And when you think in a movie, you have to organize something in the first place. 

Antonio de Lacy  26:23 

The first thing is where. Where I think the answer is easy. Rafern is a nice place. It's a beautiful city, close to the sea, very close to the mountains, and probably the best in the south of Europe. We are not discussing South, North etc., we don't have many important things, let me say political things, however we have to start. The second thing is we need to create something because we have the city and we remember in 1992 , we have the best, probably the best Olympic city in the world, probably the Olympic Games was the best and it's very difficult to replicate. Okay, it's time to do in health. But health is not hospital. Health is everything, healthy cities, healthy many things as you just go to the door and you will see immediately. Third is to create the hospital. The hospital itself in a city, is more than a hospital. But at the same time there is no desire to go to the hospital to make a diagnosis. Very important. I wanted to know if I’m young and I wanted to be let me say married or where you want I wanted to have a kid I wanted to know exactly what is my probability to have a kids with a horrible disease that will probably change and break my life.That genetic testing I wanted to be a surgeon but no surgery body I wanted to be surgeon for genes, could imagine to do, fantastic. And third going to the hospital and my specialty is robotics. Okay, robotics now is a manipulator is not real robotic surgery. We wanted to start with the 6G, 6G when you add 5G to the artificial intelligence and we add another thing and we there yes, we are working really hard on the I try to convince people is to have a conversation with a robot. You sit  at the console and the robot realizes immediately if you are an expert, beginning, junior surgeon, etc. And if you're an expert, probably you run, you are the boss. But you are a junior, probably the boss is a robot. And the robot is connected with you. I don't know another thing I like very much, because when you are thinking about your parents or your grandparents, you only have pictures. I discussed this with Zina about this. I wanted to have more than a picture. Because with the time you are forgetting people, you are forgetting the skills. And when you have everything we can do that when you work with industries like Medtronic, Johnson and Johnson, Intuitive, etc., in the future with more than manipulators probably you can connect robots. Now we're working with two robots, two surgeons at the same time with one patient with one disease. It is absolutely idiot. Could you imagine if you have a connection, and sometimes your connection is just to do, I don't know, to make a simple suture, in a valve in a cardiac valve, because you experts say no, no, no, do like this. And it's five minutes, why not connect? And the problem as you know, as the beginning, you say, do you think it's really important to have a lawyer behind you trying to rob money? I don't think so. I think the important is to treat patients,

Luca Venza  30:27  

Are there any hospitals? I mean, how do you see this evolving? Are there existing hospital groups interested in this? Or is this something we have to build from scratch with entrepreneurs and and ambitious scientists,

Antonio de Lacy  30:42  

There are many people, the important thing is not institution, the important people for me is human beings. There many people, many gen surgeons, but I didn't want to work with surgeons, I wanted to work with, you know, biology, mathematics, many people different than this. And there are many people. And people always when I saw a presentation about a new project people are talking about money. I think money is not really important. There is a lot of money in the world. And nobody knows how to invest the money. The main problem is the difference between, you know, what we call I don't know, our Western society, with other societies with more than poverty. The main thing is I don't understand why people is discussing about vaccines, the third doses of vaccine when some countries they don't have,

Luca Venza  31:46  

I think that's it's important to remember, as we're talking about, sometimes we get lost in the science of this event. And we need to remind ourselves of the SDG, the impact element. And so I think that's an excellent input. And maybe for Dehi coming back a little bit to Okay, let's get back to this data element. Right. So what is the health impact? How do you organize the data? What do you foresee, I know this is not your decision alone, but how do you maybe both of you foresee this data being used and maybe give us 10 years out, what might surprise us that you think we'll be able to do that we can't do today?

Deji Akinwande  32:26  

Yeah, so the question about massive amounts of health data that can be collected by wearables, I think this will ultimately lead to the idea of the digital twin. So your digital twin is a virtual model of representation of you. Just like we model, you know, buildings, we model aircraft, we can now be able to model human beings. And so this is very, very important, because I think this is the only thing that can lead to true personalized medicine, and preventative medicine, because we need to understand every individual. So for the case of vaccines, if you have a digital twin, that is your clone, then each individual, the dose that they need will be different, to be customized to what that digital twin is, to me much more effective. So this is what I see as the incoming future.

Paul Weiss  33:33  

Yeah, so actually, I think that that's gonna go even further, the kind of data that Deji is collecting is building up enough so that we'll start to gain understanding. So actually, I like to think about smart data rather than big data. You get there by collecting enough to develop the ability to know what you need, and know when the information set is complete. And there's actually a whole field of mathematics that studies that we work very closely with those, you know, those folks in in a number of areas, and I think it's coming in sensors as well, you know, at the nanoscale, what we've been able to do is be able to get the structures of biomolecules without having to make crystals and without averaging. And just in three years in our laboratory, working with two of the leaders in the field, we accelerated that process from the point where it took two years when we started down to 10 minutes. And we didn't even get to the smart part of recording data contextually. But I think where Deji is opening things up for us, is that once we know what we need to know, then we can go and get it contextually and say, you know from the digital twin, for instance, watch your blood pressure or watch, you know, this propensity for a disease that you have and I'll talk to you later about when they mentioned and that'll give us an opportunity to move upstream. One of the things that didn't come up yesterday, I think, to my surprise was privacy and that data, right? If you're, if you're connected to the internet with everything in your data, someone will be able to read that. And that has consequences as well. You know, maybe as we go forward, we can be, you know, beyond, maybe it'll be PUZZLE X or next year's PUZZLE X, we might talk about, you know, some of the privacy considerations that will come in from all the data that will be out there.

Luca Venza  35:35  

And I'm really curious, I want to go back to this digital twin and propose, well, there's also kind of a movement of a physical twin. I mean, you see organs on a chip, you see, and there's a movement of physical, personalized medicine, right, let's stop using animals and let's test in a safe environment on human cells. I don't know how you feel about organ on chip, but you know that that's another possibility. Is it an either or, or is it both and?\

Deji Akinwande  36:05  

Well, I don't know if I'm the right person to because that's a philosophical question. But I guess inside the doctor philosophy, maybe I should have my own thoughts on this. I don't think it's exclusive, it could be both. But the use case scenarios are different. So in the case that you mentioned, and I think that is to provide foundational knowledge, that could be a key document to perhaps apply to a segment of society. In the case of this digital twin, I think this is something that could be applied to everybody. Everybody, if you have low cost, wearable sensors, everybody wearing these sensors could acquire their own data about their daily life. And this data can then be contextualized to become smart data. And so everybody, in principle, just like everybody has a smartphone, everybody could have their own digital twin. So I think this is a very universal thing that can apply to everyone.

Antonio de Lacy  37:08  

Only a good example, because it's funny, it's fantastic, because we're trying to do the same with a digital, you know, surgery patient. Could you imagine you have a very difficult operation, we spoke about software in cancer, and you prepare-- this patient the day before surgery. Because you have all the information and you put everything, and you created an avatar with this disease. And you do it with a robot, and the robot learns many things. Say be careful, because they have the information from many, many surgeons with the same operator that were working on it. And that's included into robotic surgery and the robot says be careful, he has this vein important hemorrhage, or something. And we are trying to do but your idea, I think it's wonderful.

Luca Venza  38:05  

Maybe Paul, I'd like to hear your thoughts as well.

Paul Weiss  38:08  

I think it's really both. I mean, there are times when you want, for example, tissue samples to see if a particular treatment might be effective. And even now, you know, they're human tumors grown in mice as a way to test will a particular chemo work. And, you know, if we can, the more we can move upstream and, and either predict or get a very early diagnosis, or at least get a signal, you know, go to the doctor, right, as they said, you go every year or some people, you know, put things off because it COVID or fear or, you know, you don't want to wait on the phone to make the appointment or whatever. If you had a signal that said, something's wrong here, or even better, there's a biomarker in your blood that indicates that you should go see a nephrologist. Then, you know, then that'll really help in terms of being able to treat very early. And one of my mentors, Lee Hood, you know, developed this P4 medicine idea very much along those lines. We don't yet have the biomarkers and so we don't yet have the sensors, but that is going to happen. And I think we already have at least the technologies we'll need to do the measurements. And then what to do with them will be up to you know, epidemiologists and clinicians working together with the data that we can get, and that's when you know, that's when we'll have the intelligence to know what to do next.

Luca Venza  39:49  

Great. That's fantastic Carolina

Carolina Aguilar  39:51  

 I just want to say that. I think it's almost there. The problem is we don't have that digital twin already there is because humans don't collaborate, we reinvent the wheel. I mean, if you scan all the books that are in the most important places, you know, scientific research centers, digitalized them and put them into a model, you will have already the digital twin model, I mean, the secrets and the metabolics, and the genetics. So all that we're talking about already, there's that everybody's running towards their own venture. But putting all that together will give us already open source models that we could work with. And yeah, save lives of animals and a lot of progress, right? I think we have to reflect in the future about how humans do collaborate, and create collaborative models that actually make that progress earlier. Because we are putting in, let's say, stones and our own path, just by protecting our own venture. So I wish that we could work on those things as well.

Luca Venza  41:05  

We're going to the data sharing conversation, Paul, and we only have a few minutes left. And I want to give everyone a final word. So we have this great audience here, innovators of the future, people who are in clinics and hospitals and research in startups, investors, maybe just going to come on the line starting with you, Dr. de Lacy, a word of advice. 30 seconds, what's the message you want to send out to the world?

Antonio de Lacy  41:32  

The message, I think it's quite simple. You know, now that the life is everything, people in the life people wanted to have immediately everything, I think as Carolina said, it’s very important collaboration. And I think with the collaboration of many parts of the world, we can create a better world. People are talking about new worlds. And I think in my speciality, education, robotic surgery, in a perfect environment, using well as for many things to try to reduce the cost of the surgery, and at the same time to have better results for our patients.

Luca Venza  42:17  

Great, thank you. Deji?

Deji Akinwande  42:20  

Yes, I would say that, I think nothing that we have said today is guaranteed for the future. Everything depends on all of us collaborating and working together towards this kind of vision.

Luca Venza  42:37  

Right, thank you. Paul?

Paul Weiss  42:38  

So maybe I'll take on a particular kind of collaboration, that's become a focal point for me, both in the academic world, but also in the financial world as a way to move things forward. And that is identifying unsolved problems. And so the Sustainable Development Goals are full of those. And when you talk to someone who's in a particular field, they'll usually want to tell you what they've done. And what you really want to get them to do is tell you their fantasy of what they'll be able to do in 10 years. And so there's a whole process of extracting that information out of people, when you know, you're a senior in an area you get on these advisory boards, and you get good at solving problems. But it's wasteful to do that only with senior people, there are students and staff and junior faculty who have tremendous capabilities that way. And there's a tremendous educational opportunity in that as well. And so you know, those of you out there who are still deciding what to do, you know, you want to find something that makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning and get to work. And you can change your mind and do something else later. But you'll learn skills along the way to take on important problems that you care about so much, you know, there's nothing else you'd rather be doing. And so we've been putting teams together at UCLA and other universities around the world and then globally, and Deji is a part of this as well, that takes on those kinds of challenges that will really matter if you come up with solutions or even headway.

Luca Venza  44:16  

I think that's amazing. The democratization of leadership really, right. It's decision making. I think we have to rethink the whole way company structures work. I work with startups exclusively, but and so that happens naturally, organically, but in bigger companies, you have to force it to happen. So that's the first thing.

Paul Weiss  44:33  

So we work ahead of startups even where we identify the problem and then pull in people who can solve it. And when you do that, you develop the IP as you go and no one else saw the problems so that, you know, it's very natural for startups and incubation and people who work well together in teams.

Luca Venza  44:51  

Yeah. Perfect. Perfect entryway for you, Carolina. So you're on the cutting edge of this. Last advice.

Carolina Aguilar  44:57  

So just a few words a little bit building into Antonio You know, people, we have an instant brain. Yes, we want everything right away, and extraordinary things take time. So I would say that I will invite people to look at those unsolved problems, and actually go for it. You know, it takes courage, you have to leave behind a lot of comfort, you are going into something you don't know. So you have to face the unknown. And it's not easy for human beings. But I think it is the way that we can really create extraordinary things as a human race. We're going to hear about it in the next talk. But this is about courage. And especially women, you see, we need a little bit more. So also for them to jump.

Luca Venza  45:44  

I think that's the perfect closing word. So I want to give my gratitude to the fantastic panel for sharing your wisdom, your thoughts with us here today. Please stay tuned. We have a fascinating next talk coming up, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with. And we'll be talking about Hyperloop here in a few minutes. But again, let's give a round of applause for our great panel here. They will be available at the coffee, please approach them and talk to them. Thank you!