Health Tech: Dave Samuelson On How Rune Lab’s Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Our Overall Wellness
An Interview With Luke Kervin
It’s important to have clean and clear value stories for all the different parties that will be using your product. Sometimes in tech, people just assume that more technology is exciting, but they don’t anchor their product in the needs and values of the target consumers. Making sure that the consumer — or in our case, the patient — feels heard and understood, and keeping that messaging clear, is important.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dave Samuelson.
Dave Samuelson’s responsibilities at Rune Labs entail working with prospective and current partners, largely med device and pharma companies, to identify how our technology can best enhance their research. Rune offers access to people and multimodal data that its partners have generally not previously had, so the majority of Samuelson’s time is spent working closely with partners to think through how this new resource can support their clinical program. Beyond external facing work, he also brings the voice of the customer into our internal strategy, working closely to make sure our internal research and product development best address customer needs.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
I was born and raised outside Boston. My family are mostly economists — super rational, quantitative-thinking, and impatient people. I’ve inherited their impatience and nerdiness, but applied it to the set of problems I find most interesting. I am characteristically millennial in so far as I find myself frustrated with the pace and inefficiency of the status quo, and that may be part of the reason why I gravitated towards neurology.
One of my main goals in neurology is to push some paradigm shifts — because right now, there is a lot of room to grow. Neurology is an interesting space because, by and large, the data used to make decisions are poor. Patient care decisions are largely based on recall. Likewise, despite heavy investment and several emerging therapeutics, there’s not enough high-quality data to determine which of these approaches has a reasonable chance of working before spending years and millions of dollars on inefficient testing. Neuro drug development can feel like building the plane as you’re flying it.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Before I even started working in neurology, I had an experience that showed me the potential for data to answer a myriad of questions about the human experience of the healthcare system. After college, I worked at an economic consulting firm where I analyzed insurance claims, which sounds objectively boring. But that’s when it became clear to me that data holds so much information about human health and how therapeutics work. There are so many unanswered health questions that could be answered with the right dataset. I think everything I’ve done professionally since then has largely been around those types of questions: How can we collect information that is generated naturally? How do we tap into what’s already going on, but at scale? I realized that we could answer questions that are much more ambitious than what’s currently being addressed simply by looking in the right places and being more deliberate in how we collect data.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
The person I’m most grateful towards helped shape my career mindset and attitude towards working in the healthtech space. I worked with Bray Patrick-Lake at Evidation Health, a health research firm, where she was essentially our chief patient officer. Bray has had a crazy career. She started out as an actress, and then she became a cop. And when she developed a rare heart condition, she became an advocate for patient-centered clinical research.
Bray brought such a sense of urgency to the table. She was constantly pushing me to figure out what type of work I wanted to accomplish in life. She had this viewpoint that you have a limited number of years to work, so you should figure out the impact you want to have — and ensure that what you’re doing will actually help someone.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“It doesn’t matter how clever or ambitious your project is if your client doesn’t want to do it.” My role in BD revolves around getting in everyone’s head and figuring out what motivates each individual person. The coolest projects and best partnerships depend on making sure all the different people on the team are on board, which can be a challenge, since every individual has different motivations. It’s my job to figure out what those are, and make sure each team member is involved for the right reasons.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
The first trait I think has been integral to my success is vision. Selling a compelling but clear vision for a better future in healthcare is what brings the right partners to the table. The second big thing is integrity. I care enormously that what I am selling is something I genuinely believe is valuable and something we can execute on. This means articulating our value proposition very clearly, but also clarifying risks and promptly communicating about setbacks. Finally, I think humor is essential. My team and I spend too much time at work to not let loose sometimes. A successful meeting has a few laughs in it for sure. Obviously, there are times when we need to be serious, but work should also be enjoyable. So many of my difficult conversations with clients and coworkers have been eased by the fact that we like and respect each other. Humor tends to remind everyone that we are all in the same boat.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on our wellness. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?
My work at Rune is focused on two sets of problems. The first is a near-term problem: enhancing care management for people with Parkinson’s disease. In Parkinson’s, there’s a decent understanding about the relationship between lifestyle, medication, interventions like deep brain stimulation, and outcomes, but taking that information and enabling patients to act on it in their everyday lives requires very personalized data collection and curation. So one of our goals is to put available data sources in front of patients and clinicians that will enable both parties to take evidence-based actions. For example, to alert clinicians if a patient is taking too much of their medication in the morning, or if the medication is interacting negatively with food. This kind of information can have a big impact on near-term care management, and we’re giving them the resources to make the changes based on evidence.
The second problem is long-term: to expedite the development of Parkinson’s treatments. Right now, there are a ton of problems with Parkinson’s research and drug development, like a lack of good measurements that reflect underlying pathology. The gold standard measure that they use in Parkinson’s research is a clinician-administered score. A doctor evaluates a patient on 30 or so points and sums up the numbers. It isn’t a precise measurement, it’s extremely variable, and it’s not connected to any underlying mechanism. But that score is what Parkinson’s clinical trials use. A huge part of our focus is on leveraging new data sources collected from inside the brain. Deep brain stimulators, which for non-scientists like myself can be thought of as pacemakers in the brain, have been around for a long time and work really well. New versions collect data on how the brain functions in addition to delivering care. We are collecting this electrophysiology data from these devices at scale to help develop measures that actually reflect the effects of the disease on the brain.
How do you think your technology can address this?
Rune’s technology is a couple years ahead in gathering and deriving insight from this brain data. But one of the main reasons why Rune is uniquely positioned to address systemic problems with Parkinson’s research and care is our innovative business model. We have two halves to our business, and they are symbiotic.
Our Parkinson’s care management side connects directly to clinicians and patients, creating high-impact touchpoints for them to continuously come back to us. And then we leverage our access to patients and the data that we’re continuously collecting to drive research. That creates a virtuous cycle where the two sides of our business meaningfully flow between one another, so care management enhances the long-term value of the therapy development side.
For example, we can help a drug company recruit for a trial because of our access to patients on our platform. Not only can we advertise a trial to our users, but based on the data we collect, we can help determine who are the right candidates for a trial, and segment them into groups.
Researchers can also use the data we collect on a more basic level to better understand disease pathology and progression. Our ultimate goal is to establish a measure that is externally collected, like via a smart watch or a survey, and align it with brain data, which can show a system level change and how a patient’s pathology is shifting.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
I’m lucky that no one in my family has Parkinson’s, but I came to feel passionate about the field because I saw how it was broken — and I felt like I could help fix it. Early on, I learned that a Parkinson’s drug needs to be near-perfect for it to show an effect in a clinical trial. That’s because of the level of patient variability and inaccurate measurements. Parkinson’s research is set up in such a way that it’s nearly impossible to run trials that have a reasonable chance of succeeding. I saw an opportunity to improve the system — if variability was reduced and confidence in measurements were increased, that would be in and of itself game-changing.
How do you think this might change the world?
Better Parkinson’s care has the potential to change a million lives in the U.S. alone. That number is only going to grow as the population ages, and we’re already starting to apply what we’ve learned in Parkinson’s for other disease areas.
In the near-term, giving clinicians access to measurable data on their patients’ status can alleviate some of the data-burden from the patients. Currently, clinicians have to rely on patients or their spouses to relay their condition, which is incredibly imprecise, especially when the stakes are so high. Right now, a patient’s own account of their condition can influence medication adjustments and stimulation settings. Part of what Rune wants to accomplish is a more-tailored clinician experience for Parkinson’s patients. That involves collecting data to drive more accurate deep brain stimulation to better manage the disease. And going back to those problems in Parkinson’s clinical trials, a long-term effect is that more accurate measures and clinical trial design could make it easier to find therapies that meaningfully modify disease. To me, that would be a game changer.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
My worry is, what do you do if you are to predict that someone is going to have serious health issues, but there isn’t any treatment available to help them? How would that impact their life? If the ability to predict diseases precedes the ability to treat them, what would that world look like? We’ve seen that happen with Huntington’s Disease. When young people learn they will have the disease, it dramatically affects how they make decisions about their future, like whether or not they go to college, for example. So the question becomes, how do we handle this situation responsibly? There’s now a whole field of research about how you tell people sensitive health information, and when to tell them, and I think we need to pay close attention to that.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)
1) It’s important to have clean and clear value stories for all the different parties that will be using your product. Sometimes in tech, people just assume that more technology is exciting, but they don’t anchor their product in the needs and values of the target consumers. Making sure that the consumer — or in our case, the patient — feels heard and understood, and keeping that messaging clear, is important.
2) The most interesting intractable problems can be solved largely through figuring out the right smaller-order problems to work through. In terms of Rune, we’re trying to learn difficult things about Parkinson’s physiology, but the way we’re doing this is by enabling people to answer much smaller and tractable questions about how to better manage their everyday life. What time did they take their medicine today? How big was their breakfast? How much stimulation are they receiving? How did each of these factors affect their tremor? We’re building a huge dataset by answering these much smaller questions, and collectively that will give us the insight and the ability to answer much more ambitious ones.
3) Ego and pride are inefficient. One of my least favorite things about the tech world is the hubris of younger entrepreneurs that believe they can do something better than everyone before them for no other reason than their own ego. And that is almost never the case. Of course I believe in dreaming big and pushing boundaries, but you shouldn’t let your ego seep into your work until you have something to show. Healthcare is the world of humility.
4) Your team should be excited to work on a project. It’s important to align an internal mission with an external one. I feel very strongly that you get much better work out of people if they believe in what they’re doing. We spend so much of our lives at work that we might as well have a good time. Working with patients with Parkinson’s can often be heavy and emotional, so I always encourage my team members to grab onto those everyday bits of joy.
5) Involve the users in your work. We have a patient advocate we work with closely, and it’s a constant reminder of the tangible impact we want to achieve. It’s not just about tech — these are people’s lives. There’s such an urgency to supporting these patients and getting them involved in clinical trials.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
I would tell young people to approach their career in a conscientious manner, and to think deeply about what they commit their time to. We all have to live together on this planet, so work on projects that make that easier, and not harder. Figure out the areas where you could have a positive impact. When it comes to Rune, I’m constantly thinking about the impact I have on lives. In addition to helping patients, Rune is also a force for job creation; we help large employers build products that let them continue to be large employers. That’s a big deal for me, because if you’re working in healthtech, you’re enabling people to live longer, and it’s a bit silly to do that in a world that doesn’t have jobs. It’s important to think about the big picture.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)
I really enjoy listening to Esther Perel, and I would love to have a private meal with her (although I would prefer a meal that allowed for wine). She’s a psychologist who has expanded from working mainly on personal relationships to include workplace relationships. She’s done a lot of work on how to make colleagues work well together. With startups, everything is about making sure that you get the most out of the people you work with, and the team functions in a highly productive way. From listening to Perel, I’ve come to believe that the main building block to getting to a productive company is awareness about the impact we have on others. From a leadership point of view, that means being aware of how to bring out the best in your team. She’s forced me to think about how to have deliberate connections with other people and being conscientious about your impact.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can read more about the company at runelabs.io!
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
