Guru Banavar, founding CTO of Viome and former VP of IBM Watson AI, discusses the future of personalized healthcare using AI and your microbiome

May 22, 2023

Guru Banavar is the founding CTO of Viome where he helped raise $150M from a list of top-tier investors including Khosla Ventures and Bold Capital Group. Viome offers insights into health and disease using host and microbiome gene expression. Guru led the development of a first-of-a-kind saliva-based early detection system for oral and throat cancers which won the FDA’s designation as a breakthrough device.

Prior to Viome, Guru was a global VP & Chief Science Officer at IBM and the founding VP of the Watson AI Research team.

Guru has received many awards including a Leadership in Technology Management Award and a National Innovation Award from the President of India. He has published extensively and holds more than 35 US patents. His work has been featured in media outlets including the New York Times, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, BBC, and NPR.

Listen and learn…

Why our healthspan is more important than our lifespan
How DNA to RNA transcription determines your health state
How to sequence your mRNA to understand how to optimize your diet and predict disease risk
What AI techniques can be used to develop personalized treatments
How to use data that varies across patients to make automated decisions for all patients
How Guru thinks about false positive prescriptions as a scientist when health and safety are at stake
Where the FDA is regulating how AI is used to make healthcare recommendations
Why it’s impossible to know the best diet for you without first understanding the composition of your microbiome
How to use biomarkers to turn your biological fingerprint into a data problem
Guru’s perspective on the ethical and philosophical implications of extending the healthspan
How digital twins will help perfect the ability to engineer biology

References in this episode…