HELLO FUTURE: The Diagnosis AI Caught: How One Patient Outsmarted a Missed Cancer

Speaker 1 (00:07):
One of the things that artificial intelligence gets people really
excited about is health and how might we be able
to use artificial intelligence and eventually quantum computing to help
save more lives for humans to live longer, especially in
the field of cancer research. Hello Future, it's me Kevin.
This is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier. The year
is twenty twenty six. The planet is Earth. My name
is Kevin SURRELLI. I'm the founder of MTF dot TV's
Meet the Future. Check us out at MTF dot tv
and be sure to listen to all of the latest
Hello Future episodes on your iHeart app. Joining me today
is the founder and CEO of cure Wise, which leverages
artificial intelligence in order to make cancer a little bit
less scary in order to understand what exactly a cancer
diagnosis means for you, for your family, and for the
longevity of your life. His name is Steve Brown. He's
got an incredible personal story. I'm so excited that he's
here and Steve, thank you so much for showing up
to Meet the Future. It's awesome to have you.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Well, it's great to be here.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
And it's such a great podcast and title for a
podcast because the future is the future here now, and
it's accelerating. And if you got diagnosed with cancer like
I did a year ago, it's a really great time
to It's never a great time to have cancer. But
what's interesting now is things are progressing so rapidly and
so many new things are happening that it's really important
to try to have some hope and to stick around
and do everything you can, because there are new advancements
every day.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
When I was a kid growing up outside of Philly,
a cancer diagnosis was a death sentence, and I always
as a kid, and I think a lot of millennials
can relate to this, and maybe other generations as well.
But I think we all assume that there would be
a Wall Street Journal or a New York Times banner
headline above the fold that says cancer cured, cure found,
and then all of a sudden, we'd snap our fingers
and cancer would disappear. But what actually happened is that
all of this change is happening so fast that there
isn't just one major headline. It's been this gradual over
in my lifetime and in your lifetime, this gradual situation
where it's less and less. I don't want to say
it's less scary, but you get the point that I'm
trying to make, which is that over time, the cure
is found. Is that kind of what you're saying we're
living through I frequently say we're living through the fifth
Industrial Revolution.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
Well it's well, first of all, it is very scary,
and six hundred thousand Americans are going to die of
cancer this year. It's a very big unsolved problem.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, but it's.

Speaker 3 (02:54):
Not just one problem. There's not just one cancer. What
we're realizing is that everybody.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
Has a unique disease.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
Because you think about it, what is cancer? It's a mutation.
It's a unique mutation of your own cells that survived
the surveillance of your own I mune immune system and
figured out how to hack their way out of all
the systems our body has to kind of prevent cancer.
So you know, it's a unique cancer is a hacker,
and it's it's totally unique to you, and so you're
an end of one. Everybody has a unique disease. So
what we've learned is, you know, we also stuff about
gene sequencing and what did my genes say? Well, actually,
the future of cancer is, let's do gene sequencing on
the cancer itself to find out what unique attributes that
cancer has, and it turns out there are a whole
bunch of mutations that might lead to specific treatments that
are really really good if you have a certain mutation.
So in my case with my what I have, it's like,
you know, the guidelines say do A, B and C,
but I had a mutation in the cancer. That's like, hey,
you know what, the guidelines might not be the right
thing for me. But it turns out there's this other
drug that's really good given the very specific mutation that
I had in myself. And so once I got on that,
it was super effective and it really worked. But if
you didn't know about that, you would get the standard
of care. And it's like I would be in a
world of hurt right now.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
See Brown is my guest and he is the founder
and CEO of cure Wise. He got diagnosed with cancer
a year ago. What was that Like, I mean, here
you are, You've had this incredible career, and tell us
a little bit about your career and how you worked
in technology and really at the forefront of futurism, and
then put us in the doctor's office when you get
that diagnosis.

Speaker 3 (04:40):
So I'd been I mean I'd studied computer science and physics,
and I went into startups in Silicon Valley, and the
startups I was in we were doing things in healthcare
a long time ago, and the original premise is genomics
plus monitoring plus AI could lead to better treatment pathways
for chronic disease. I was so long ago that the
patents that I had on AH that I've already expired.
So I was in this field for a long time
ago and for a long time, but the pace was
really really slow until AI. So until AI kind of
became practical and on the scenes. You know, AI was
in theory back when I was doing it the first
time around. Now it's practical in real So when I
got diagnosed with this rare blood cancer, the first place
I turned was AI, which is essentially, how do I
go tap into the collective consciousness of all of humanity
and all of knowledge it's ever existed to try to
figure out what's going on with me?

Speaker 2 (05:41):
Wow?

Speaker 1 (05:42):
So what I just had to meet the future moment.
I just had to meet the future moment because when
you were saying was here you are, You're getting this horrible,
horrible diagnosis, and your instinct wasn't your first thought, Rather,
wasn't I need to get to the best human doctor
in the world in order to beat this. Your first
thought was I need to access the best technology and
artificial intelligence that we've ever had in order to beat this. That,
right there, folks, is what it's like to live through
the Fifth Industrial Revolution. That's the difference between twenty twenty
six and nineteen ninety six right there in that thought process.
And I think more and more people are going to
have that meet the future moment where you are literally
standing where the future enters into your life on a
very real, real personal level, whether it's whether it's in
Steve Brown's case getting diagnosed with cancer or whether you're
facing a loved one who's getting that diagnosis. So your thought,
your instinct is I got to get to the best
of artificial intelligence. And then you must have realized, well,
this system doesn't exist yet, I've got to create it.
And does that where cure wise came from.

Speaker 3 (06:55):
Well, I had been involved in healthcare long enough to
know that. Turns out, doctors are people, and people make mistakes,
and people have all kinds of limitations and you know,
we want to get home for dinner and you know,
want to go play golf or do something else.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
So and so.

Speaker 3 (07:14):
So I'd already known that, uh, you know, healthcare is
a little bit demystified for me already from working in
it for for.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
A lot of my career.

Speaker 3 (07:22):
But the other thing that it happened is when I
finally got diagnosed, I realized I had been misdiagnosed by
doctors for a while too. So you know, I knew that.
You know, doctors aren't perfect. You know, they're they have
a lot of knowledge. They're doing the best that they can.
But there's more knowledge out there that can fit in
a human brain. So you know that, So I need
you need to find, like A, you know, a bigger
brain for all this knowledge to fit in. And AI
has you know, with these large language models, it's essentially
a compression algorithm for human knowledge, and it's putting it
all into this one you know, there's one pop Well,
there's one black box. The challenge with A is that, yes,
we've compressed all a few knowledge into this black box,
but depending on how you ask the question, you might
get a different answer. Learning how to access the knowledge
that's there, and to get something that's more relevant to
you and isn't kind of leading you down the wrong
rabbit hole is also a challenge. So a lot of
what I was building was on top of existing large
language models, but with a specific context of my own
medical record and recognizing that it's not.

Speaker 2 (08:27):
Going to have perfect answers.

Speaker 3 (08:29):
Just like in real life, talk to five different doctors,
you might get five different opinions. So I made like
thirty six different AI agents that all might have slightly
different opinions, but then I made them argue with each other.
It's like, you know what you guys all are. I
want you to have different opinions, but then I want
you to argue it out and see where you agree,
see where you disagree, and that'll help me get to
a better answer.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
So what again? And folks, we on Hello Future, we
talk a lot about this concept of AI agents and
it sounds like a you know, Mission Impossible, Tom Cruise
movie or Secret Agent James Bond. But all an AI
agent is put very very simply a voice in the matrix,
and it sounds sci fi, but that's what it is.
If you've ever played a video game, it's it's a
character in a video game that is living and breathing
and performing its function as it exists. And so what
Steve Brown, the founder and CEO of cure Wise, did
was he essentially made a bunch of doctors out of
AI AI agent doctors. Now again, I'm not a doctor, Steve,
You're not a doctor. He leveraged the intelligence of AI
and had them all debate in the AI platform. Right,
so people always ask me, keV, what's the difference between
an agent and AI, and you know all this stuff.
It's essentially the agents live in the AI. And again
I'm oversimplifying, but that's what I do here. I translate
the future. That's what I try to do. But he
had all of these agents debating and performing functions. So
if you take that what concept, what I just described,
you could have musicians, You can have different musicians all
playing at once. If you're an intelligence agency. And you know,
Anthony Vincy has been on this program frequently with his
you know, after he left certain government agencies to talk
about how intelligence agents and different government platforms could be
doing intelligence activity, police officers, firefighters, you name it. You
could play this concept out in many different ways and
it's happening now. So back into health for cancer, you created,
Steve Brown, founder and CEO of cure Wise, these different
AI agents to debate the cancer diagnosis in order to
go through what your treatment and your cure should be.
And then you must have realized that you could apply
this for other people. So what specifically does cure wise
do and how does it help people?

Speaker 3 (10:57):
Can I start with just like agents and how I
use agents and what it means, because you know, I
do want to demystify that, because it's I have five
agents running right now on my computer, and they're basically
workers doing things that they're working for like robots doing
you know, super smart robots doing a task that I want.
I've got two agents working on business development stuff. One
is actually in the background on my computer working on
doing a whole bunch of research for a very sophisticated
proposal to a health plan. I've got another agent working
on my whole business development lead leads list, researching every
lead and figuring all this stuff out for me. I've
got three other agents working on code right now for
an app that we're using, is a kind of internal
app we're using to help our business.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
So now back to the healthcare thing.

Speaker 3 (11:46):
When you sign up for cure Wise and you're working
with cure Wise, there are a bunch of different agents
that are workers that are kind of trained in very
specific tasks related to your health. There's one kind of
set of agents that is like, hey, let's bring in
your entire medical record and let's organize that and understand
it and kind of prioritize it so we understand, like,
you know, we don't need to know there's stuff in
your medical record that's like ten years old, you know,
and it doesn't have any relation to the question you
have now, But there's stuff that's really important, So let's
organize your medical record so AI can do a better
job with it. And then if I go into a
specific question like like hey, what are the precision medicines
that people with my gene genomic profile of my cancer
are getting? There can be different agents with different points
of view going in and tackling that question and maybe
having different opinions and different ideas sorting that out among
themselves to kind of get you a better answer. So
it's kind of like, I don't know, if you remember,
there was a TV show called House MD where he
would go in and like have all these insights, but
he would gather people together in a room. They go
into conference room, all these different doctors and they'd look
at a case and they'd all be talking about it,
and then he'd like absorb all this and you'd come
back out and say, Okay, this is what we need
to do. What we're doing is kind of like there's
this concept called a tumor board. You know, you've got
to cancer and people don't know what to do or
there's a lot of different options. Should you get the surgery,
should you get the radiations, should you.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
Get the chemo?

Speaker 3 (13:12):
Which chemo should you get? You know, should you do
this clinical trial? There's all these different ideas. So it's
like gather all that. I mean, if you lucky enough
to have a whole room full of doctors like a
house MD to go argue about your case, all these
bright minds would think about your situation and sort it
out and come up with hopefully better ideas.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
Well.

Speaker 3 (13:31):
What we're doing is we have a bunch of agents
that go do that. They all look at your case
and they all have different ideas and they're all coming
in from different points of view. Because we're intentionally making
them have different points of view, because we want them
to have different ideas, so there's more of a spread
of ideas so that then they can kind of sort
out and figure out which are the best ideas, and
then when you synthesize all that, you get a more
complete picture.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
And it's just very helpful.

Speaker 3 (13:58):
And now a lot of the ais are starting to
do this kind of process in the background, so you
don't even know that this is happening. They're they're running
your question multiple times and you know, trying to sort
out in multiple different ways and trying to sort out
the best answer.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
You know, we're trying to hide this. We're trying to
make this really transparent.

Speaker 3 (14:14):
It's like, Wow, you've got a you know, a surgeon
kind of has this opinion, and you've got a radiation
on colleges has this opinion. You've got a chemotherapy guy
has this opinion, of an immunology person has this opinion.
That's really good. We want all those opinions. We want
to see what they are, and then we want to
that we want that to educate us and help us
get to a better solution. Like these agents are not
being the doctor. These agents are helping educate me. If
you have a complex disease, you know you have a doctor.
Your doctor might have hundreds of patients and want to
get home for dinner like you just have you, So
you need some agents on your side so that you
can be smarter about your disease. You need to become
an expert in your disease so that you can advocate
for yourself.

Speaker 1 (14:59):
We all can relate to that. Whether it's cancer, whether
it's any issue of life throws you a curveball. You
have to become the expert so that you know what
questions to ask, and asking those questions just crucial no
matter the domain. I find this so fascinating. Steve Brown,
the founder and a CEO of cure Wise, I would
imagine you're already thinking of other It's not just with
cancer that this could be applicable to correct.

Speaker 3 (15:27):
It's applicable too well. For I say, AI is applicable
to just about everything.

Speaker 1 (15:31):
Yeah, but cure Wise, specifically cure Wise.

Speaker 3 (15:35):
The process we're doing would work with any medical condition
because it's about understanding your medical record and what are
the possibilities for you. But with cancer, there are some
specific things where you really need to go deeper. And
that's because cancer is this creature that evolved in a
different direction that's living inside you. Basically it has its
own genes now, so understanding the genetics, the genomics, and
the molecular profile of that cancer is really important, and
that's kind of a unique thing to cancer. So cancer
is more complex, but it's also the area where there's
just amazing exponential advances in the diagnostics and being able
to do the genomics on the cancer and all the
new treatments and immunotherapies like reteaching your immune system how
to find it and figuring out how to unhack the
hacker that you have found a way to the cancer
was like a hacker that found a way to survive
all these systems that buy out your your body has created,
So how do we unhack that? There's there's some very
specific things in cancer where we can go much deeper.
So that's what we decided to focus on. Also because
it's been like this moonshot for decades now. It's been
this unsolved problem for decades, but AI finally gives us
a tool that enables us to really make some significant
progress in a whole.

Speaker 1 (17:04):
New way, Steve Brown, we're gonna leave it there. Thanks
so much for showing up to meet the future the
founder and CEO of cure Wise.

Speaker 2 (17:11):
Thank you.