Can AI Detect Disease Before Symptoms? w/ Dr. Guru Banavar, Founding CTO, Viome

What if your body could flag health problems before they show up? The warning signs may already be hiding in your RNA, the molecule that reveals which genes are switched on and what the trillions of microbes inside you are doing right now. Today's guest built his company around using AI to read RNA and reveal what's changing in your body to potentially catch problems long before they become symptoms. Welcome back to Humanify Health Tech, where we explore how AI is rewriting the rules of healthcare and putting people back at the center where they belong. I'm your host, Brian Chee, Senior Director of Content at NetHealth. Today, I'm joined by Dr. Guru Banavar, founding CTO of Viome, where he leads the AI systems that decode an individual's biology from non-invasive samples, then turns it into a personalized diet supplement and diagnostic plan. Viome's AI system processes 100 quadrillion biological data points against a catalog of more than 100 million genes and genomes drawn from analysis of over a million microbiomes. I think that's about 100 billion millions of data points. Not sure. Before Viome, Guru spent 21 years at IBM, where he founded the Watson AI research team. In 2017, he left what some might call the best job in AI for a startup almost nobody had heard of. These days, Viome is pretty hard to miss. Guru, welcome to the show.

Wow. That was an amazing introduction. Thank you very much for having me. And I think you actually stole a lot of my thunder. But this is good. This is good. So I can pick up from there and then take it to the next level.

Well, let me tell you, you have so much thunder, though, because because I didn't include like the Nobel stuff that you've done and the conferences that you've been that you've attended and you've spoken at and all the other things that you've done. And in your varied and really amazing, prestigious career. So thank you. So I think you've got a lot more to talk about. Let me tell you. But thank you. Yes,

I'm excited to talk about the topic that you have focused on in this show, which is that, you know, health needs to be everybody's concern, number one. and health care needs to put patients in the center, number two. And number three, I think preventive medicine is the only way to really go. I think we should not wait for diseases to happen and then react to it. I think we should be proactive and we should figure out what's going on in our bodies before big problems arise.

Awesome. Okay. So let's, let's get down to it then. Let's talk about your, let's talk about your day job as the preeminent engineer and AI architecture visionary of Viome, right? Thank you. Yeah. What you are building there is an infrastructure that according to the website on Viome will create a world where illness is optional, which is such an aspirational, such an aspirational statement. It's, it's, um, It's amazing. It's bold. Right. But it does fit and it fits with your story. So you go you just to just to bring the audience up to up to up to speed here. In 2015, you were standing on the noble stage talking about how sometime in the near future, experts would one day work with learning and reasoning machines to come up with