Prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is a strong believer that data science will reinvent health care as we know it - and it's position he has reiterated on a number of occasions, including at the 2014 Big Data in Biomedicine conference at Stanford. In a recently published Washington Post Q&A, Khosla expands on his comment that over the next ten years "data science and software will do more for medicine than all of the biological sciences together."
On the topic of books and papers that have influenced his views, Khosla said:
A lot of what I've been thinking about started with articles by Dr. John Ioannidis at Stanford School of Medicine. What he found through decades of meta-research is that half of what's in medical studies is just plain wrong... His research is focused on why they are wrong and why all sorts of biases are introduced in medical studies and medical practice.
He also explains one of the reasons he believes innovation in data science and software is outpacing the biological sciences:
The pace of innovation in software, across all industries, has consistently been much faster than anything else. Within traditional health-care innovation (which intersects with "biological sciences") such as the pharma industry, there are a lot of good reasons those cycles of innovation are slow.
It takes 10 to 15 years to develop a drug and actually be in the marketplace, with an incredibly high failure rate. Safety is one big issue, so I don't blame the process. I think it's warranted and the [Food and Drug Administration] is appropriately cautious. But because digital health often has fewer safety effects, and iterations can happen in 2- to 3-year cycles, the rate of innovation goes up substantially.
Previously: Countdown to Big Data in Biomedicine: Leveraging big data technology to advance genomics, Countdown to Big Data in Biomedicine: Mining medical records to identify patterns in public health, Collecting buried biomedical treasure - using big data, Big data used to help identify patients at risk of deadly high-cholesterol disorder and Examining the potential of big data to transform health care
Photo of Khosla at the 2014 Big Data in Biomedicine conference by Saul Bromberger
