Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Q Bio
Building Medical Care for the Future
As the founder of Affirm, Jeff Kaditz (MCS 2003; SCS 2003) may be best-known for his work building the innovative consumer lending platform.
Now he鈥檚 working on his next big game-changing idea: The future of health care is information science.
He wants to get more actionable data in the hands of patients and their doctors, so he鈥檚 designing a process that acts like a 鈥渃heck engine light鈥� for the human body.
鈥淓verybody probably knows somebody who has died unnecessarily from something that was totally preventable,鈥� Jeff says. 鈥淚n this modern age, we have the technology to know when changes are occurring in our body that are red flags. It shouldn't be accidental or too late when we find out about them.鈥�
His early-stage startup, Q Bio, is partnering with health care providers to deploy the first holistic clinical digital twin, Gemini, that combines a person鈥檚 medical history, genetics, biochemistry and anatomy to build a systemic model of what is changing in a person鈥檚 physiology. This technology can be made cheap enough to become a standard of care thanks to a revolutionary new kind of whole-body scanner his company has developed. The technology is based on breakthroughs in computational biophysics that allow multiparametric and quantitative, whole-body MRI scans to be done 40 times faster and on much cheaper hardware than existing clinical MRI scanners 鈥� in open geometries where patients can stand, sit or lay down.
Q Bio has been running a clinical pilot over the past five years with incredible results.
鈥淥ur pilot results surpassed my initial expectations,鈥� Jeff says. 鈥淭here are about 10,000 known human diseases, and the data we collect in about 30 minutes is sensitive to changes related to well over half of those known issues and probably many we haven鈥檛 even classified yet.鈥�
The company recently began partnering with large international health care systems to deploy Gemini to automatically identify asymptomatic patients with the greatest risks of existential health events in the near term.
鈥淲e can currently gather almost 7 billion data points about your body in less than 30 minutes, Jeff says. 鈥淲hen combined with other data, this is orders of magnitude greater than the next best, and we do it for more than an order of magnitude less the cost.鈥�
鈥淲e now have an initial approximation of an A2D converter for the human body that will continue to improve and ultimately enable 鈥楽tar Trek鈥� Med-Bay-like scenarios. In the future, people will go to a place that鈥檚 like a car wash for your body. Everything will be measured about you quickly and noninvasively and used to update your digital twin in the cloud. Based on what is changing in your body triage, algorithms will automatically prioritize and schedule who should see a doctor and what kind based on risks. A summary of those risks will automatically be sent to your PCP. If you don鈥檛 have any major changes in your risks, the system will recommend when would be best for you to come back for your next physical.
鈥淭his will be the standard of care in the future. If it鈥檚 not a matter of if, just when.鈥�
Story by Elizabeth Speed