2026, Future Pharma - Keynote_ Precision Medicine at the Tipping Point_ How AI, Social Media and Geopolitics is Bringing Cure

Announcer: So next on the stage we have Rome Maddison, founder of Genetics for Healthcare podcast, talking about how precision medicine is at the tipping point

Rome Madison, Founder, Genetics for Healthcare Podcast: Kudos to you, Kevin, for bringing and bearing gifts. I don't have any gifts, but it is a gift for me to be in your presence, a room full of professionals who are ushering in the future of the pharmaceutical industry, and in large part, the future of the healthcare industry, which has been referred to time and time again as precision medicine.

Now, I've been a-- in this industry for over two decades, ushering in genetic and genomic testing, different products. And I've been a podcaster in the space for about eight years. I started the Precision Medicine Podcast in 2018. But watching the industry, there's a lot to get excited about. Number one, if we just look at the investments, the acquisitions, and even the FDA approvals of therapies just last year 36% of all FDA-approved therapies were genetic and genomic-targeted therapies.

If we just look at oncology, in the cancer space, 76% of the therapies approved in 2025 were genetic or genomic-targeted therapies. Rare disease. We know that there are over 10,000 rare diseases, and thanks to whole genome sequencing over the last decade, we found a genetic or genomic target for about 6,500 of those diseases.

And it doesn't stop there. When we're looking at heart disease, which is still the number one killer of men and women in our country today, just last week, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study that showed they found a gene that you can knock out low-density lipids, like low cholesterol, the low-density cholesterol that causes and drives heart disease.

And it's happening in neurological diseases as well, like Alzheimer's disease. And in having these conversations, I love what Burns Blackshaw said, that one day this is not gonna be called precision medicine. It'll just be called medicine because this is what everybody will get with the spread of GN-- NGS testing and the access to testing in all different diseases.

But it's important for us in this room to understand, with all this innovation that's happening, if we look at the total addressable market, today it's valued at about $280 to $300 billion. In

2020-- In 2034, it's expected that this is gonna top $700 billion in terms of its value. But with all this innovation, we gotta remember that innovation doesn't mean anything if patients can't access it. So my platform is to close the gap in patient access to precision medicine, and I have a grassroots, and I also have a top-down strategy to do that.

The grassroots movement is direct to consumer education and empowerment through the Genetics for Healthcare podcast. We're a weekly show. It's a video platform where we share patient stories, but we also interview experts who speak directly to consumers to help them learn the language of precision medicine and to become more effective advocates for themselves or someone that they love.

But also, we have a top-down strategy where I coach leaders in the life science space. I work with commercial leaders to transform complacent teams to go all in on new ideas, new direction New turnaround to deliver these innovations to the patients that really need them. I coach leaders to activate their confidence because confident leaders build confident organizations, and that's the only way we're gonna deliver on the promise of the future of the pharmaceutical industry.

Now, how many of you by a show of hands over the last decade has heard this at least once, that precision medicine is at a tipping point? Show of hands. Not many hands. Okay. How many have heard this so much that you don't even believe it anymore, and you don't really know what to believe? Now, I think it's instructive for us to understand what a tipping point is because in healthcare, tipping points don't happen very often.

Things that, that come into the space that change the way we do business or the way that we treat patients, they don't happen very often. So what is the tipping point? According to Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote the book Tipping Point: How Small Things Make a Big Difference, he says the tipping point is the moment before ideas spread like wildfire.

Now, again, there's not many ideas that spread like wildfire that happen all the time in healthcare. It takes a while for a tipping point to happen. But when it does happen, those things tend to stay in place for quite a while. For instance, in this book, he talks about fax machines. The fax machine hit the market in 1984 and reached its zenith in 1987, just three years.

At that point, big companies all had fax machines, and so if you were a vendor or a supplier to those big companies, that meant you needed to have a fax machine too because if you didn't, you were at a disadvantage for those who were competing for the business. And shortly after 1987, you saw computer manufacturers, you saw business machines integrating fax technology into their products.

That was the tipping point after 1987. Here's the thing Fax machines hit the market nineteen eighty-four, hit the tipping point nineteen eighty-seven, but our healthcare system still runs on fax machines All right. So electric, electronic medical records, EMRs. Did healthcare systems in physician offices adopt EMRs because it was a great idea?

Because it was a great way to keep track of patient records and be more efficient? No. They did it because it was a federal mandate, and they were compensated to do it. I'm just trying to share with you that tipping points that affect how we do business in healthcare just don't happen that often. But when they do, they tend to stay for a while.

But there is something that we experience as a society that can help us understand how these three components of AI, social media, and what's happening in our world today through geopolitics is going to get us to a tipping point much faster. So anybody that, that has kids, help me with this one, 'cause I have two teenage daughters.

And I get it, I just don't know why this is funny. Six Seven. Are we still doing this? Is this still happening? Is this still a thing? Like, why are we... why am I still doing it, right? So Six Seven. I get that it was a rap song, there was basketball players, but we had videos going viral about kids in burger joints going crazy for Six Seven.

At sports games or ice cream shops or in schools going crazy about six and seven. I don't get it. I just don't. Now, what's instructive about this, about how that became a social epidemic, will teach us why we're on the verge of a tipping point with precision medicine. Now, I don't understand why it's a thing, but I understand how Six Seven became a thing.

Because mass action, mass adoption happens not only when the average consumer can understand and participate, but when young people understand and can participate. So we're gonna look at the adoption of precision medicine getting to a tipping point from that lens as we go forward. And I think it's instructive to us as to why precision medicine is coming a lot faster than we think.

First of all, AI is driving digitalization. We've talked about it. It's in everything that we do. It's been in every conversation that we've had this morning. AI gives us the ability to streamline a lot of things in healthcare. And I recently interviewed Andy Moy, who at the time was the GM of digital products at Tempus AI.

He says that AI, and the lowest hanging fruit, and the fastest way that it can make an impact in this healthcare industry is it can simultaneously Streamline the patient workflow process and access to innovative therapies while also decreasing physician load and burnout. At the point of care now, at the patient encounter, and I think Kevin was just speaking about it, they have the ability to access an AI bot that can give them access to the most recent clinical data before it's been incorporated into medical guidelines, before payer policy changes.

Package that information up along with the patient's record and relevant data and send it off to streamline prior authorization. Think about digital pathology. I'm not sure who just talked about it, but someone talked about the time it takes to make a diagnosis and then follow that through with the recommendations.

Think about this. Computational pathology can make more accurate diagnosis more consistently twenty-four hours a day, no matter where the patient is. You can get to a diagnosis to recommendation for clinical care where before or today it takes weeks. In some best case scenarios, days. But with the advent of AI and computational pathology, it'll take minutes.

Even from a consumer perspective I was at UCLA about a decade ago talking to Dr. Carlo Bifulco and others. Dr. Carlo Bifulco says this about patients. But at UCLA, they were demoing a VR technology, it was called Precision VR, and they were training the next generation of neurosurgeons, and it allowed the fellows to step into the anatomy of the brain of the subject that they were preparing for a high-risk procedure.

And it gave them a 360 view inside of that patient's brain to help them understand the risk and the dangers to avoid while they're in procedure. Not only did that VR technology help prepare the surgeon, they're able to give a pair of VR goggles to a patient to help them understand and get their confidence and buy-in to the high-risk procedure that they're going to endure, and they believed that would improve outcomes.

That was ten years ago. Today, this VR technology is used everywhere by neurosurgeons It just goes to show how this is bringing technology to our fingertips. That our knowledge and the way that we learn around the genome, what it looks like, this technology is getting better, and it's getting cheaper, and it's on our way to elementary schools, so they can envision what genomes look like.

I'm just here to tell you, AI is here to stay, but it's a great thing because it is empowering patients with the ability to be the experts in their care before the healthcare system catches up. Social media is causing disruption, and I think we can all agree that social media is driving disruption of everything good that we used to love about society.

But when it comes to driving disruption in terms of delivering information, the ability for social media to disseminate medical information is second to none. Not only are healthcare systems and clinicians using social media to reach more people, to drive expertise, to get people engaged in being empowered to be their biggest advocate for their care.

It's digital first, it's always available. And for those of you who are worried about medical mis- disinformation, why? That cat's already out of the bag. Listen, I'm a Gen X-er, and I think Gen X-ers are part of the trust but verify, right? Give me the information I think I can sort through to help me understand what's useful and find out what's bull crap and just dismiss it, right?

But these numbers were really surprising to me. Fifty-five percent of adults in the US reported, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, that they use social media to access medical information. Sixty-six percent of Americans in another one report that they use social media to learn from people who have similar conditions as they do.

Where do they find them? Instagram, Facebook. There's groups. There are significant organizations that have become nonprofits c- making a difference in the adoption of these innovative products and testing through social media. Here's the one that shocked me. Any Gen Z's in the house? Anybody? Thank you for...

Thank you, two of them. Okay, so 54% of Gen Zs said that they trust information on TikTok

You guys might be smarter than what everybody else thinks. I want you to consider this. This is Dr. Alan Wu. He's the chief of clinical chemistry and toxicology at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, and he sensed a decline in the brightest talent coming into laboratory medicine because it doesn't get the shine of other specialties.

And so he had a hypothesis that said that if he can leverage social media, he can drive more awareness of the impact and the importance of laboratory medicine. Seventy percent of all medical decisions are based on a result that comes from a lab. But if you publish that through traditional channels, the distribution is only in the thousands.

But social media can boost that distribution and awareness into the hundreds of thousands, and in some cases, into the millions. So he started a TikTok channel. He looks like a TikTok influencer, right? He didn't do it. He hired an influencer to give case studies and talk about how laboratory medicine has created breakthroughs and changed things in our healthcare system, and these are the results.

His TikTok channel is called Lab Tales. To date, he has over sixty-three thousand followers, seven million views. Now, we know there's data behind the data that a view is not a, a quality view. But listen, this was published in the Journal of the Applied Science A-Applied Laboratory Medicine. This is significant.

What it shows us is that if we in this room are not leveraging social media to reach the next generation, we're missing out. And then there is geopolitics. Recently, this episode is up now. Dr. Otis Brawley is the former chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. He said that there's a real increasing anti-scientific sentiment present in leadership today.

And I think we'd have to be under a rock to understand that even recently, geopolitics is really affecting how we look at trusting our leadership and medical experts. But the net result is not necessarily all bad because according to the Harvard Global Health Institute, the fluctuating trust in medical and scientific authorities has created an environment where populations aggressively self-educate themselves via non-traditional, often decentralized channels.

You know what they were talking about? Podcast. Podcast gives you borderless access to consumers around the world at a net zero marginal cost If you look at the major distributing platforms of podcasts, which are Spotify and Apple Podcasts, on a monthly basis, they're reaching 500 million listeners and viewers in over 180 countries around the world.

Look at these numbers from just the Infinite Dial report last year. 34% of Americans are listening to an average of eight hours of podcasts a week. 23% are listening to over 10 hours a week. Stephanie Luisa gave a presentation here last year talking about the Netflix effect, that it's bingeable content.

That's what podcasts are, 'cause when people find a podcast, what do they do? They go back and listen to the beginning and binge all the episodes. That's what we all tend to do when we find something that we really love. And people are opting in. They're self-selecting the content that they want to consume I recently had the privilege of interviewing Matthew Zachary.

Over the last twenty years, he's been a cancer patient advocate, advocating for patients to take control, to be the expert in their condition, and to advocate for the care that they deserve. And he said it best, "AI, social media, and podcasts are democratizing data and empowering patients to be the experts in their rare disease or their predisposition before the health system catches up.

We're at an inflection point because the time is right for a cancer patient revolution." In closing, this is my QR code. If you want more information about this or want to find out ways that you can build a more confident organization to power your organization forward, I'd love to hear from you.

But how many of you are Michael Jackson fans? Michael Jackson. There's a whole lot of hands. That's what I'm talking about. Michael Jackson is the baddest of all time, the greatest of all time. The thing I love about Michael Jackson is I saw the movie and you saw where he set the world on fire in nineteen eighty-three for the Motown twenty-fifth anniversary when he did the moonwalk.

If you think I'm gonna moonwalk, that ain't happening. But here's the thing, I was surprised to learn this. He did the moonwalk that became a, a global social epidemic, but that wasn't his plan. The moonwalk was just something that people who dance... Breakdancers had been doing similar moves called the backslide.

So it was just a setup to what he thought was gonna catch on like wildfire, the move where he stood on his toes. So when he came off of the stage, Michael Jackson was almost in tears because he didn't nail that move. But the next day, after forty million people watched him for two seconds do the moonwalk, it was an idea that spread like wildfire I wanna leave you with this.

AI, social media, podcast, in and of themselves may not cause an idea to spread like wildfire. So don't think wildfire, think sparks. The moonwalk, Michael Jackson intended to be a spark for the movement, but it ended up being the small thing that caused an idea to spread like wildfire. When you leverage these tools in your business, they might be the spark that causes a wildfire of cures and disease prevention for generations to come.

Thank you.

Announcer: Thank you, Ryan