PHOTOGRAPHY: DAN BURN-FORTI. ILLUSTRATION: NICK D BURTON049 STARTWhen a close relative
developed Parkinson’s,
Katharina Volz got to
work. Her AI is now
creating a 3D database
that could reveal new
therapies for the most
intractable conditionsA map fordefeatingdiseasesKatharina Volz is on a mission to crack
one of medicine’s most intractable
problems – a cure for Parkinson’s
disease – by making a map. The founder
and CEO of medical startup Occamz-
Razor hopes artificial intelligence can
plot everything we know about this
neurodegenerative disorder, fill in the
gaps, and home in on potential cures.
In 2015 she had just finished her
PhD in stem cell biology at Stanford
University, in California, when a close
relative was diagnosed with the disease.
“I was completely devastated,” she
says. “I stayed at home for two days
and cried.” Then she got to work. “I made
this resolution that I was going to find a
cure for Parkinson’s disease.”
But first she had to work out what
was already known, by mining tens
of millions of datasets – scientific
papers, clinical trial evidence, patents,
patient records and genomics data.
Stanford’s AI laboratory helped the
startup develop an artificially intel-
ligent system that combines all this
data into a 3D graph, which Volz calls
the Parkinsome – a complete map of
everything we currently know about
Parkinson’s: genetic components, all the
known proteins, cell types and metabo-
lites that play a role in the disease, and
the drugs known to interact with them.
The first challenge for the Parkinsome
is to find any drugs used for other
conditions that could be repurposed
for Parkinson’s. Volz plans to partner
with pharmaceutical firms to take the
candidate drugs through the costly
clinical trial process to the market. “I
don’t want to wait another ten, 20 or
30 years,” Volz says. “I want to bring
effective medications to Parkinson’s
patients as soon as possible.”Above: CEO Katharina Volz believes OccamzRazor can benefit a huge range of conditionsThe company, whose advisers
include Google AI’s lead Jeff Dean
and the Nobel-winning cell biologist
Randy Schekman, won’t share its
platform directly with researchers,
but it is working with the Michael J Fox
Foundation to identify potential areas
for fruitful research. Volz says that
the OccamzRazor database already
includes information on a vast range
of conditions that could benefit from
an AI-led approach. “We are looking
at one disease at a time, taking all the
knowledge there is and connecting it.”
Matt Reynolds occamzrazor.comWe know that we spend too much time checking our smartphones – but what does it take for us
to actually switch off? Ranjan Jagannathan founded Synapse, an app that manages notifications
by organising them into batches delivered at set times. He created the app after working with Dan
Ariely, a professor of behavioural economics at Duke University, in North Carolina, who studies the
impact of push notifications on mental wellbeing. Ariely’s research showed that receiving notifica-
tions in three daily batches increased users’ productivity and reduced stress levels, compared with
getting them immediately, or not at all. “It’s about finding a good balance between constant distrac-
tion and fear of missing out,” says Jagannathan. “People would like to receive 17 notifications a day,
when in reality, they get 73 on average,” says Jagannathan. “The first step in fighting smartphone
addiction is to let users regain control over their devices.” Daphne Leprince-Ringuet synapse.lyTHREE SERVINGS A DAY FOR GOOD HEALTH11-19-STKatarinaVolz.indd 38 06/09/2019 12:20