Precision Signals

In the latest episode of Precision Signals, Sean Khozin speaks with Peter Kolchinsky, founder and managing partner of RA Capital Management.Peter’s perspective is shaped in part by his experience as the child of Soviet Jewish immigrants. His parents brought him a deep appreciation for education, hard work, entrepreneurship, and the opportunity to improve the systems around us.That mindset has guided his journey from scientist and virologist to biotech investor and institution builder.In this wide-ranging conversation, Sean and Peter discuss:• How Peter moved from studying biology to helping scientists translate discoveries into medicines• Why the biotech industry needs stronger institutional memory, including a willingness to learn from failed experiments• The limitations of AI in drug development, where generating a promising molecule is only the beginning of a years-long clinical learning process• Why China’s expanding clinical trial infrastructure may have a greater near-term impact on the pace of R&D than AI• How the FDA can be understood as a community of people working within a complex institution, rather than as an opaque gatekeeper• Why CEOs must define their role by what it takes to advance the mission, including advocacy for patients, innovation, and better policyA substantive discussion about immigration, science, entrepreneurship, AI, clinical trials, regulation, and what it means to build organizations that keep learning.

There is a sentence most physicians are trained never to say. Three words: I don't know. Thomas Clozel learned early — from Valentin Fuster at Mount Sinai — that those three words are not a confession of failure, but the beginning of discovery.Thomas is an oncologist, co-founder, and CEO of Owkin. He trained in Strasbourg, then crossed the Atlantic to work under Fuster in cardiology and alongside Olivier Elemento and Ari Melnick at Weill Cornell in computational biology. Ten years ago, he left clinical medicine to build a new kind of superhuman intelligence for biology — on a contrarian bet that chemistry was the confined, solvable problem, and that biology, the messy, causal, unsolved one, was where the real discovery lived.In this conversation, we trace that arc: from federated learning across the world's hospitals, to a mesothelioma study that surfaced categories of disease no human had ever named, to Owkin Pro — an AI scientist that, in Thomas's words, is beginning to have ideas of its own. We discuss why big pharma keeps missing the AI wave, why he thinks Anthropic could be the biggest pharma in five years, why the treatment for Alzheimer's might one day come from a fifteen-year-old in a garage, and what it will actually take for him to say, someday, that he has succeeded.

Sahir Ali’s career defies conventional paths. Trained as an engineer, he worked in quantitative finance, contributed to cancer research, built software companies, and ultimately founded Modi Ventures, where he developed the BioStack investment framework for technology-driven life sciences.In this conversation with Sean Khozin, Sahir explains how systems thinking, mathematics, and first-principles reasoning shaped his approach to investing. They discuss the evolution of artificial intelligence in medicine, the realities of drug discovery, founder psychology, venture capital, and why enduring innovation often comes from connecting ideas across disciplines rather than following trends.

In this episode of Precision Signals, we speak with Mike Krzyzewski, known to most of the world as Coach K, about leadership, trust, teams, cancer advocacy, and the human side of progress.Coach K is one of the defining figures in American sports. Over more than four decades at Duke, he built championship teams, led the United States to Olympic gold, and shaped generations of players and coaches whose lives extended far beyond basketball. But this conversation is not only about winning. It is about what allows people to come together, stay connected under pressure, and do difficult things in service of something larger than themselves.That question matters well beyond the court. In medicine and healthcare, progress depends on more than discovery, technology, or individual excellence. It depends on trust between people, coordination across institutions, and the ability to keep patients at the center when the system becomes complex. As we discuss leadership, teamwork, artificial intelligence, and the future of care, Coach K offers a perspective that is practical, human, and deeply relevant to the work of improving health.At its core, this conversation asks a simple question: how do we build the kind of trust and shared purpose that allows people to do hard things together?

Dr. Brian Druker helped change the course of modern oncology through his central role in the development of imatinib (Gleevec), a therapy that transformed chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) and helped establish the modern era of precision oncology.In this episode of Precision Signals, Dr. Sean Khozin speaks with Dr. Brian Druker about the scientific, clinical, and human story behind Gleevec, from the early search for a drug that could inhibit the abnormal signal driving CML, to skepticism around targeted therapy, to the first clinical trials and the broader impact on cancer medicine.The conversation also explores Dr. Druker’s path into oncology, the development of targeted therapies beyond CML, the limits of molecularly targeted drugs, the arrival of immunotherapy, the challenge of persistent leukemia cells, current work in AML, and how AI may help generate hypotheses while still requiring rigorous biological validation.This is a conversation about scientific persistence, translational medicine, precision oncology, and what meaningful progress in cancer research really requires.