The Business of Health with Chip Kahn
The Drug Enterprise in the Age of AI
November 10, 2026
Listen on YouTube
About this Episode
Episode 23, AI Series: AI is speeding up the search for new medicines. Can it make the discoveries themselves?
Few people are better placed to answer than Dr. Elias Zerhouni. He ran the National Institutes of Health, then global R&D at Sanofi. He co-founded ModeX Therapeutics, which uses machine learning to design antibodies that don’t exist in nature, and he is now vice chairman and president of its parent company, OPKO Health.
His test for AI: give it every piece of data available in the early 1950s, and it would not have found the double helix. The spark, he argues, is still human.
Chip and Dr. Zerhouni dig into what AI is actually doing in drug development, how the FDA stacks up against regulators abroad, and what a slowdown in AI — and the erosion of American research — could mean for the next generation of cures.
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
Elias Zerhouni, MD
Former National Institutes of Health Director (2002-2008); Vice Chairman and President of OPKO Health; Professor Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University
Elias Zerhouni, MD, is currently Vice Chairman and President of OPKO Health. He was the President, Global Research & Development, and a member of the Executive Committee for Sanofi from January 2011 to July 2018.
Dr. Zerhouni’s academic career was spent at Johns Hopkins University and Hospital where he was professor of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering and senior adviser for Johns Hopkins Medicine. He served as Chair of the Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences, Vice Dean for Research and Executive Vice Dean of the School of Medicine from 1996 to 2002 before his appointment as Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 2002 to 2008. In that position he oversaw NIH’s 27 Institutes and Centers with more than 18,000 employees and a budget of $29.5 billion (2008).
In November 2009, President Obama appointed Dr. Zerhouni as one of the first presidential U.S. science envoys. Dr. Zerhouni also served as senior fellow to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation from 2009 to 2010 and senior advisor to the CEO of Sanofi.
Dr. Zerhouni has founded or co-founded five start-up companies, authored more than 200 publications and holds several patents. He has assumed positions on several Boards, the board of the Lasker Foundation, Research!America, the NIH Foundation and Danaher Corporation. He is also a member of the Council of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He received the prestigious Legion of Honor medal from the French National Order in 2008 and was elected in 2010 as a member of the French Academy of Medicine and appointed as Chair of Innovation at the College de France in 2011.
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.