“We are starting to be able to reverse aging,” reports Dr. Daniel Kraft.
“The first opportunity is in more proactive self-care: not waiting for the ‘sick care’ model to happen to you. So first of all, that means do all the blue zone stuff – optimizing sleep, movement, helping your friends and having them keeping you on track, diet, social connection, sense of purpose. Pay attention to all these things. Don’t wait for a magic pill.”
The second opportunity, he says, the big picture, is built on top of emerging exponential technologies.
As the chair of medicine for Singularity University, Kraft has been running an annual conference once called Exponential Medicine, and now called NextMed Health. (It’s happening in December and you’re invited.)
“The magic we've been curating is to get health care professionals out of their old silos. A lot of healthcare gatherings focus on cardiology, oncology, or pharma. We bring people from all walks of life, cross-pollinating and integrating all aspects of health.”
Watch Daniel Kraft at METAL
At the conference, and in many of the companies in which Kraft’s seed-stage venture fund is invested, “we’re bringing all these emerging technologies together to reimagine prevention, diagnostics, therapy, global health, and public healthspan. The future is
coming faster than you think. A lot of these solutions and technologies exist today. They're just not plugged into your doctor's office yet.”
Kraft recently ran down some of those exponential tech areas exciting him the most.
WEARABLES
“Clinicians are just starting to get on the bandwagon of leveraging your Apple Watch data over time, because it's your change from baseline that matters. We can watch your vital signs over months and years and the next generation of wearables will track – real time – blood pressure and blood sugar. Wearable devices will screen your brain for strokes and other neurologic issues. In a decade, we're going to be at a point where our metabiome or digitome can be tracked 24/7.”
Kraft uses wearables consistently. “I've got my Oura Ring. I'm trying the Ultrahuman Ring. I've got my Apple Watch, and my Whoop [wearable fitness tracker] is charging. I pick whichever one gives me a better sleep score at night.”
Other wearables exciting Kraft now can track post-surgery mobility, identify if you’re in the early stages of covid or other diseases, and even give voice to those who might have lost theirs.
DIAGNOSTICS
Kraft says “‘Dr. GPT’ already often does a better job than specialists.”
The downside for doctors, he adds, is that they might become so reliant on AI they might never learn to properly develop the skill of differential diagnosis without using GPT. That’s a meta-question across all users of AI, he says, and across all kinds of learning.
Significantly, AI also puts new power in the public’s hands. The phone is becoming a diagnostic platform.
You can already go to ChatGPT 4.0 and upload your basic X-ray and get it reported to you in English, for example, whether your knee is healthy or if it has osteoarthritis.
“We will have better and better diagnostics on your smartphone camera. You don't need to be wearing a wearable to pick up vital signs seamlessly. One cool innovation is that we’ve discovered voice is a biomarker for mental health and neurologic disease. It can pick up if you have diabetes or not, or when someone's ovulating. So even voice, with this tech, supports diagnostics.
PERSONALIZED MEDICINE
A major theme in Kraft’s future prognosis – and investment strategy – involves what he calls “generative health.”
“Imagine that your Chatbots and Fitbits and AI and Apple HealthKits are contoured to our individual age, culture, personality, and health journeys. It’s the end of ‘one-size-fits-all’ medicine and can guide us with far greater precision on prevention, health span diagnostics, and therapy.”
PERSONALIZED MEDICAL COACHING
Even more intriguing to Kraft, medical counseling will be increasingly personalized. “This is so necessary,” he says, because if medical direction is not engaging, we fall off the wagon. The hardest intervention for doctors is often behavior change. Every person has a different headspace and nudges that might help us take action to stay healthy. We now have new tools that help get folks on that behavior change pathway, using behavioral mechanics and digital biomarkers. These individualized tools can be gamified and get folks tuned in and making changes.” Avatars, he says, will become your personalized health coaches and therapists, drawing from the collected wisdom of therapeutic fields. They will know how to talk to you.
“They might look like your mother or your psychologist,” he predicts, “and you can optimize them for your own response. You will also be able to port in your own AI nurses. You can't replace a live nurse, but they can start to do some of the scut work in the AI realm.”
GENOMICS
“Sequencing cost $10,000 a few years ago. Now it's about a hundred dollars and we’re moving to ten. What does that mean for you? It means we're starting to crowdsource genomes of thousands and millions of people and bringing that knowledge from the lab into the clinic. In the next decade, we'll see the ability to make sense of our genomics all across all body systems. Today, we bucket diseases in silos, but we’re learning how to personalize diagnoses and prescriptive treatments.”
With CRISPR [gene-sequencing technology], he adds, “we're not just able to read DNA, we're in the era of writing DNA. You've all heard about CRISPR. Only about a decade old, it’s already been cleared by the FDA for curing things like sickle cell [anemia] disease. In the near future, we're going to see gene therapies able to cure diseases before you get them. For example, we’ll be able to knock out the high cholesterol genes in your liver so that you'll never get high cholesterol and clots and heart attacks in the first place! We’ll be writing new personalized DNA vaccines for Alzheimer's and cancer – and all based on your own individual risk factors.”
INTO THE PROTEOME
“You can measure thousands of proteins from your blood, the exosome where you've lived, your metabolome, your sociome, your microbiome. With that, we will be able to create digital twins to optimize your prevention, diagnostics, and therapy, instead of the one-size-fits-all model we have today in healthcare. ”
MIXED REALITY
Surgeons can be increasingly guided step-by-step with knowledge from thousands of surgeries before them, using AR and seeing ‘through’ the patient. A pilot himself, Kraft says, “I love lessons in virtual reality from the cockpit. Real-time information can guide me. It’s embedded in the helmets of fighter pilots. That kind of tech will increasingly similarly be embedded for clinicians and surgeons.”
IMPROVING THE HUMAN TOUCH
AI tools allow doctors to offer more time and proper empathy for patients. As AI is being integrated into doctors’ workflows, it also helps stress levels and keeps the doctors themselves from getting burnt out.“Too often, we’re not looking at the patient,” he says, “but the medical record chart. AI is enabling us to focus more on the doctor-patient relationship.”
MOBILITY
Exoskeletons are evolving and bionic devices “are really going to up-level all of us. Exo-bots, for example, will mean that if you're ninety, you will be able to walk like you're forty.”
FOOD
“Our most important drug is still food,” says Kraft, “and new tech allows you, for example, to track your metabiome and with incredible specificity measure how different foods affect you.”
IMAGING
“Imaging is getting faster. The next generation of full body scans will take ten minutes. You’ll be able to get them done at your corner pharmacy, and you don't even need to go into an MRI scanner.”
The science of early detection is galloping forward faster than most people realize.
“We now can screen for early biomarkers for cancer over the counter for about $800. And we're learning that blood proteins can give you early biomarkers for Parkinson's, neurologic, and other diseases, sometimes five to ten years before they show up.”
IN CONCLUSION
Kraft emphasizes that these new tech areas are coming quickly. He sees AI on mobile devices and wearables blending with robotics creating autonomous systems that will play an ever greater role in home care, virtual pharmacy, and surgery. Hopefully, he says, “in cuddly, more engaging ways.”
He sees crowdsourcing massive new data as a consistent game changer. Integrating it all is his mission.
“I launched a platform a year ago. On this site – https://danielkraftmd.net/digitalhealth
– you can find tools that you might want to use today. Things like a live-core EKG you can buy over the counter to track your cardiovascular health, platforms that might help with type 2 diabetes, therapeutic interventions that leverage diet and nutrition. Everything from getting your heart scan to your full body scan to different forms of wearables.”
Kraft’s excitement is palpable.
“We’re shifting from physical and virtual to digital, from intermittent, reactive sick care to care that's continuous, proactive, anytime, anywhere care.”
As he says, the best way to predict the future is to create it, and he’s experimenting, investing, testing, and creating as fast as he can.
And he has a special message for METAL members.
“It's a great time to invest in healthcare. I've got a seed stage venture fund. We're investing in early health tech and healthspan companies that are moving the needle. Come find me if you are investing in or have a startup in the space.”
To visit Dr. Kraft’s online resources and learn more about his conference, go here: https://danielkraftmd.net/digitalhealth
Written by Adam Gilad
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