Innovating Health Against Future Pandemics

Innovating Health Against Future Pandemics covers the key aspects which drive heterogeneity in an individual's response to COVID-19, including age, sex, genetic makeup, immune responses, comorbidities, and viral strains/loads. This book also reviews the case examples from other disciplines to highlight areas where precision medicine and AI could be applied for the improvement of pandemic management. This includes research, primary and secondary prevention, isolation/tracking, hospitalization and patient management, diagnosis, and treatments. Lastly, drawing on past experiences for each of the areas this book provides practical recommendations to manage future pandemics. COVID-19 offered an unprecedented occasion to test the impact of digitally enabled solutions within precision medicine for public health and for accelerating their deployment and adoption.

Section 1: Epidemiology, data and technology 1. Understanding the disease and its epidemiology through data and technology Section 2: Treatment / Pharmaceutical R&D 2. The use of computational biology in protein engineering and drug discovery 3. Innovative clinical trial design and operation - Implementing hybrid and fully decentralized trials in a post-COVID world Section 3: Triage, diagnosis, risk prediction 4. A perspective on Artificial Intelligence for digital pharmacovigilance in pandemics 5. Consequences of the isolation in vulnerable populations: Brain and mental health in the older population 6. Design for isolation, confinement, and mental health during intensive care 7. Triage, diagnosis and risk prediction: The benefits and challenges of digital health and AI technologies Section 4: Management and policies 8. How digital solutions can ensure continued high-quality care for patients during pandemics 9. Beyond one-size-fits-all: Precision medicine and novel technologies for sex- and gender-inclusive COVID-19 pandemic management 10. Innovating healthcare in the mid of a pandemic

Simona Mellino is Strategy and Business Enablement Lead at Roche Pharma, managing portfolio strategy and management. Prior to that, she was a Life Sciences Consultant, advising top pharmaceutical and medtech companies on commercial and digital strategies and focused on precision medicine in oncology and neurology. She worked at Accenture in the Life Sciences Strategy and Consulting practice. She has 8 years of experience in product development and launch across pharmaceuticals, medical devices, digital health categories and author of several publications in precision medicine (e.g., Nature Digital Medicine). She serves as Vice President of Women’s Brain Project, where she works on novel technologies for brain and mental health. She holds a Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry from Oxford University and a Master in Healthcare Management, Economics and Policy from SDA Bocconi with a specialization in market access and pricing.

Enrico Santus is Head of Human Computation in the CTO Office at Bloomberg, where he manages products and designs the long-term vision for human-machine interactions. In the last decade, he has been at the forefront of AI, developing and leading Microsoft products in Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). His education includes a PhD in NLP at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University on topics related to lexical semantics and ontology generation. After the PhD, he pursued three years of postdoctoral research between the SUTD and the CSAIL (MIT), actively contributing to the development and industrialization of AI solutions for medicine, pharma & crop science, as well as numerous COVID-19 initiatives, including the MIT tracing app. He was granted several awards (e.g., Stand Up to Cancer, Facebook, etc.) for his research, which counts over 75 papers and 1500 citations. He is advisor of several start-ups and has been an invited speaker on NLP at the White House. In the last years, he co-authored several fact-sheets for th

• Explores the benefits of AI technologies in triage, diagnosis, and risk prediction
• Reviews the innovative clinical trial designs in terms of platforms and decentralization
• Covers Healthcare workload, including remote monitoring to help prevent burnout