Q: What’s one of the projects you’re working
on in response to the pandemic?
A: Biotechnology companies are very quickly
trying to find therapies for the virus. One of
the ways that we are getting more quickly to
these engineered therapies is using machine
learning. We’re trying to understand the human
immune system. So if you have like a read out
of all of the T cells in your body and understand
the distribution of those T cells in your
bloodstream, you should be able to understand
what diseases your body is actively fighting or
that has fought in the recent past. The trick is to
build mapping between that T cell profile and
the actual illnesses. That’s the thing that’s sort
of evaded biologists forever. We are now able
to use the techniques of machine learning to
build that mapping and a blood test that may
be able to help us understand how the
immune system is responding.
Q: Are there projects you’ve said no to?
A: There is this push – not from us, but from a
bunch of folks – about doing mobile phone-
based contact tracing as a mechanism for
helping to manage the pandemic over the next
handful of months. We’re doing some really
interesting work right now in research to try to
understand the privacy and personal liberty
implications. Whether or not this turns out to be
something that is a good idea, we would want
to be one of the voices pushing to make sure
that if it happens at all, that it’s done in a way
that preserves privacy and confidentiality.
Q: What do you tell family and friends about
what your work is like right now?