Rewriting Life: The New Era of Medicine

For a century, antibiotic discovery has relied on “dirt mining”—the laborious screening of soil and water samples for bioactive compounds. This strategy has yielded important drugs, but it is too slow to keep pace with the accelerating rise of antimicrobial resistance. Our laboratory has pioneered a complementary paradigm, digital discovery, which uses AI to mine biology at scale—including ancient genomes—to identify functional molecules with therapeutic potential.

When your body fights infection, immune cells jump into action—but they also need the right fuel to do their jobs. My research shows that the nutrients surrounding these cells can completely change how they behave. In this talk, I’ll explore how studying the “diet” of immune cells is helping us understand inflammation and disease in new ways.

Imagine your body leaving little clues everywhere—something in a doctor’s note, a tiny signal in a heart test, a pattern hiding in a scan—but no one has time to connect the dots. In this talk, we’ll explore a new kind of AI that acts less like a search engine and more like a medical detective, digging through mountains of health data to piece together the story of what might be going on. Could these systems one day become a kind of “doctor’s doctor,” helping physicians catch diseases earlier by spotting the clues humans might miss?