The Business of Health with Chip Kahn
About this Episode
Episode 21, AI Series: Medicine has its maps: Anatomists charted the body, and the Human Genome Project gave us the code. Now, the Human Cell Atlas, a global effort involving thousands of scientists, is using AI to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells to understand human health and diagnose, monitor and treat disease. Given the extraordinary implications for drug discovery and potential cures, Chip talks with Dr. Sarah Teichmann, co-founder of the Human Cell Atlas, chair in Stem Cell Medicine at the University of Cambridge, and a non-executive director at 10x Genomics, among other roles, about the potential of the Human Cell Atlas.
The Host
Charles N. Kahn III is a senior visiting fellow at KFF. He is also a visiting senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a nonresident senior scholar at the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics. He serves as co-chair of the international Future of Health collaborative.
Guest
Sara Teichmann, PhD, FMedSci, FRS
Professor of Stem Cell Medicine at the University of Cambridge and the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, Vice President, Translational Research at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)
Sarah Teichmann, PhD, FMedSci, FRS, completed her PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and was a Beit Memorial Fellow at University College London. She established her research group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 2001, where her main discoveries included the finding that protein assembly pathways are stereotypical and conserved. In 2013, she transitioned to the Wellcome Genome Campus, where she became the first and, to date, the only faculty member appointed across both the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Sanger Institute. In 2016, she was appointed as the Head of the Cellular Genetics program at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and co-founded the Human Cell Atlas initiative. Starting in April 2024, she was appointed chair in Stem Cell Medicine at the University of Cambridge, within the Department of Medicine and the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute.
Additionally, Dr. Teichmann dedicates part of her time to GlaxoSmithKline, is a non-executive director of 10x Genomics, and has co-founded two startup companies. The Teichmann lab focuses on developing and applying cell atlas technologies to understand human tissue architecture, particularly examining how cellular diversity is generated in the immune system and during development.
SERIES
This weekly podcast features insightful conversations between host Chip Kahn and his guests, who discuss the business of health care, connecting the dots between the health care business, policy, and patients.
The podcast’s first series on AI in health care illuminates how AI is changing health care, and features guests who are deploying this technology, managing its consequences, and designing policy around it.