Takeaways from Gary Monk at NextMed Health 2025
Here are my Top 7 - NextMed Health 2025 - Day 1 Highlights:
🚀Daniel Kraft, MD kicked off with a call to move from reactive sick care to proactive, tech-enabled health, emphasizing AI, super convergence, and the need for collaboration. The focus: not just what’s next, but what’s needed to build a smarter, more human, and equitable future
🚀Futurist Jamie Metzl argued that the future of healthcare isn’t just about AI or tech, but about unleashing human imagination, values, and collaboration. He called for a shift from one-size-fits-all care to precision medicine, urging us to harness converging technologies not to replace humans, but to empower them
🚀Dr. Anthony Chang, MD, explored how AI, particularly generative and agentic models, is evolving from decision support to becoming a collaborative partner in healthcare, paving the way for digital twins, cognitive AI, and more equitable, data-driven medicine
🚀Michael Gillam, MD, highlighted that medical breakthroughs still take an average of 17 years to reach widespread use, but exponential tech and "composable care", modular, AI-powered journeys deployable from anywhere, could help close that gap. He noted ’today is the slowest rate of change we’ll ever experience again, and healthcare must catch up’
🚀Surgeon-innovator Rafael J. Grossmann, MD, shared how XR and AI are transforming medicine, from training and diagnostics to precision surgery, while emphasizing the need to preserve human connection. With tools like AI-powered smart glasses, haptics, and digital twins, he envisions a future where surgery can be augmented, or autonomously delivered, in ways once thought only possible in science fiction
🚀Dr. Bayo Curry-Winchell highlighted how systemic bias, embedded in clinical guidelines, technology, and provider behavior, can lead to life-threatening disparities for marginalized groups. She called for equity to be built into healthcare innovation from the ground up, urging us to check our biases, co-design with diverse patients, and prioritize fairness in every solution
🚀After a rare cancer diagnosis was missed by doctors but caught by AI, Steve Brown built "medical agents", AI avatars that simulate expert conversations and flag overlooked diagnoses. These tools, already delivering faster and more personalized insights than traditional care, could democratize access to tumor boards and help patients become true partners in their own treatment
Day 2 Recap: My Top 7 Takeaways from NextMed Health:
🚀 Hans Keirstead introduced the Human Immunome Project, an open, AI-powered global dataset to unlock new therapeutic targets and enable affordable, personalized care. He also shared early results from M1 Stem, a $1 therapy showing promise in reversing immune aging, building muscle, and reducing inflammation without exercise
🚀 Lucien Engelen delivered a powerful keynote weaving urgency, innovation, and empathy into a call for upstream healthcare transformation. From early detection to AI and patient-owned data, he challenged the audience to move beyond reactive care and start designing systems around trust, empowerment, and real-world impact
🚀 Don Vaughn, Ph.D. outlined a groundbreaking new approach combining one-day TMS treatment with neuroplastogens has shown a 70% remission and 90% response rate in depression, offering hope for scalable, rapid mental health recovery. By contrast, traditional TMS requires 36 clinic visits over several weeks, an unrealistic burden for many patients
🚀 Maddy Dychtwald (75) reframed aging as something we can influence, not endure, emphasizing that longevity is 90% shaped by lifestyle, not genetics. While focused on women’s health, her science-backed strategies, like strength training, anti-inflammatory habits, and mindset shifts, offer valuable, empowering guidance for anyone aiming to extend not just lifespan, but health span and brain span
🚀 Christopher Mason expounded that spaceflight isn’t about extravagant billionaire joyrides or ignoring Earth’s problems, it’s a frontier for understanding human biology and protecting life itself. From tracking immune shifts in orbit to preparing for Mars, these missions help us confront existential risks and build tools that serve us here on Earth as well as in space
🚀 And Catriona Jamieson shared that in space, stem cells age and mutate faster, allowing scientists to study cancer evolution and stress responses in days instead of years. This accelerated environment has already helped test a new cancer drug, Rebesanib, which targets stress-activated enzymes that fuel tumor growth
🚀 Brandon Staglin shared his recovery from schizophrenia, showing how innovations like precision psychiatry (data-driven treatment), brain-based therapies (like cognitive training), and lived experience leadership are reshaping mental health care to be more effective, personalized, and empowering for those with severe conditions
NextMed Health Day 3: My top 6 Takeouts:
🔘Eric Topol, MD highlighted how AI and multiomics are transforming medicine by enabling precise, personalized prevention of major diseases. He stressed that while the technology is already advanced, cultural resistance within healthcare continues to slow its adoption. He also emphasized that the physician’s role should evolve to become even more human, with AI serving as a supportive partner
🔘Max Hodak, shared progress on Prima, a wireless retinal implant that restores real-world vision for people with advanced retinal degeneration, and unveiled his long-term vision for biohybrid brain-computer interfaces — using lab-grown neurons to create scalable, biocompatible links to the brain that could one day enable new senses, shared perception, or even merged consciousness.
🔘Sheila Nirenberg shared groundbreaking clinical results showing that a light-activated gene therapy restored functional vision and color perception in blind patients, thanks to a newly discovered mechanism using depolarizing ion channels to unblock surviving retinal circuits. This breakthrough may extend beyond vision, offering a potential new way to treat neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s by amplifying weakened brain signals rather than replacing them
🔘Catherine Liao introduced “arterial intelligence”, a new approach that goes beyond traditional blood pressure’s ‘two numbers’ to decode rich vascular waveform data, revealing early signs of aging and cardiovascular risk. By transforming wearables into continuous arterial health monitors, her work aims to enable personalized, proactive longevity through deeper and more meaningful insights
🔘Meron Gribetz at Inner Cosmos unveiled a minimally invasive brain-computer interface that treats treatment-resistant depression by stimulating the brain’s cognitive control network, offering TMS-level efficacy in a discreet, at-home device. Early results show faster, longer-lasting remission, with future applications targeting Alzheimer’s, OCD, and cognitive enhancement
🔘Tjasa Zajc a digital health expert and patient advocate shared her journey with IBD and thrombosis, reminding us that ‘diagnostics mean little if you don’t have a solution to the problem.’ Her talk was a powerful call to replace luck with data-driven care
My 10 Key Takeaways from Ray Kurzweil on AI’s Impact in Health and Medicine at NextMed Health:
🔘 Drug discovery is accelerating — AI can now scan thousands of drugs and diseases in days to find new uses, a process that once took years
🔘 Clinical trials are evolving — AI-driven simulated biology may soon replace early-stage human trials, cutting costs and speeding up testing
🔘 Personalized medicine is coming — Future drug regimens will be tailored to each patient’s genetics, lifestyle, and comorbidities
🔘 Fully automated AI labs are emerging — Capable of designing, testing, and optimizing new molecules from scratch in a matter of days
🔘 Surgical robots powered by AI are advancing — Moving from assistants to autonomous operators, planning and performing procedures with greater precision than humans
🔘 Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) like Neuralink and Synchron are progressing — These allow control of digital tools by thought and could eventually integrate AI directly into our brains
🔘 AI can already detect rare conditions and triage patients with limited data. As it becomes embedded in wearables and everyday tech, it will enable real-time monitoring and early intervention, often before disease begins
🔘 Longevity ‘escape velocity’ is near — Kurzweil predicts that by 2032, medical advances will extend life faster than we age
🔘 Human error is being reduced — AI can help prevent misdiagnoses and poor care, though new oversight is needed to ensure safety and trust
🔘 Exponential change is often underestimated — Kurzweil warns that what feels a decade away may arrive in just a few years
🔘 Drug discovery is accelerating — AI can now scan thousands of drugs and diseases in days to find new uses, a process that once took years
🔘 Clinical trials are evolving — AI-driven simulated biology may soon replace early-stage human trials, cutting costs and speeding up testing
🔘 Personalized medicine is coming — Future drug regimens will be tailored to each patient’s genetics, lifestyle, and comorbidities
🔘 Fully automated AI labs are emerging — Capable of designing, testing, and optimizing new molecules from scratch in a matter of days
🔘 Surgical robots powered by AI are advancing — Moving from assistants to autonomous operators, planning and performing procedures with greater precision than humans
🔘 Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) like Neuralink and Synchron are progressing — These allow control of digital tools by thought and could eventually integrate AI directly into our brains
🔘 AI can already detect rare conditions and triage patients with limited data. As it becomes embedded in wearables and everyday tech, it will enable real-time monitoring and early intervention, often before disease begins
🔘 Longevity ‘escape velocity’ is near — Kurzweil predicts that by 2032, medical advances will extend life faster than we age
🔘 Human error is being reduced — AI can help prevent misdiagnoses and poor care, though new oversight is needed to ensure safety and trust
🔘 Exponential change is often underestimated — Kurzweil warns that what feels a decade away may arrive in just a few years
