What's Eric Schmidt-backed Hologen up to?

Last year, my colleague Brittany Trang covered an unusual deal between a publicly traded genetic medicines company and a mysterious AI company named Hologen, which was putting forward $430 million to help develop a Parkinson's treatment.

All that was known about Hologen was that it was co-founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Now we have more details: Brittany obtained a pitch deck, which details how the company thinks it can quickly make money — an eye-popping amount of it — with "large medicine models" for digesting clinical trial data. Hologen is targeting a $150 million Series A fundraise, according to the document.

large language models

Hospitals build their own private ChatGPTs

Stanford Health Care and Penn Medicine have designed ChatGPT-like interfaces for their staff to be able to query and explore their electronic health records. Why did they decide to build internally rather than buy from a litany of vendors promising to solve all their problems?

One reason is that hospitals are overwhelmed with the number of third-party products they already manage. Stanford Health Care already has 1,500 point solutions plugged into their IT system, chief data scientist Nigam Shah told us.

"Every new application comes with its own integration challenges, identity and access management, bug fixes, updates," he said. "They all have their roadmap, and they all want us to co-innovate with them. It is utter madness."

Read more from Brittany here, and check out her latest issue of AI Prognosis to learn more about the tools that Stanford created to measure how many errors and hallucinations there were in each AI-generated chart summary.

genetics

Google DeepMind open sources AlphaGenome

Google's AI research arm DeepMind announced a full release of AlphaGenome, a model that predicts how DNA encodes gene regulation. Alongside a publication in Nature, the company is making the model's source code and weights available for noncommercial uses.

Observers believe the move s important to realizing AI's potential to help researchers uncover which genes linked to complex diseases are driving their biology, Megan Molteni reports. Even before the full release, AlphaGenome generated significant interest from the research community: 3,000 scientists have used the model and are sending 1 million API calls to DeepMind's servers every day.

Health tech news roundup

Sword Health, best known for its virtual physical therapy offering, announced it will acquire Kaia Health in a deal valued at $285 million. Kaia offers digital musculoskeletal care and pulmonary rehabilitation, and the company has an established presence in Germany which has a favorable reimbursement structure for digital health products. Stateside, Evercore ISI analysts predicted the acquisition would be "minimally impactful" to Sword's main competitor Hinge Health. Sword has raised just shy of $500 million according to PitchBook.
Spring Health announced it will acquire Alma. Spring is one of the leading companies selling health plans and employers mental health benefits for their members and employees. Alma builds technology that helps independent mental health practitioners run private practices, including an online portal where people can find clinicians who take their insurance. The deal will allow Spring to "extend the reach of its advanced AI-enabled capabilities." Spring has raised $466 million according to PitchBook. I'm catching up with the company's co-founder and president Adam Chekroud this week — let me know if you have any questions for him.
Earlier this week, a manager at clinical research software giant Veeva Systems announced on LinkedIn that Veeva had sued Epic in Wisconsin state court over the EHR record giant's "illegal" non-compete clauses. This is also a point of contention in the lawsuit against Epic from Texas AG Ken Paxton. Got the court documents? Email Brittany: brittany.trang@statnews.com
Akido Health, a startup and provider known for its "AI doctor" technology, will be one of the companies involved in an "AI-powered safety net program" in the San Francisco Bay Area. Akido announced it raised $60 million last year.

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