Medical innovation needs you

In April, I gave a TED talk on the main stage in Vancouver, and it was released online today. You can watch it here.

Watch the TED talk

I’ve also written a longer companion article for Works in Progress, which was published last week – you can read it here.

I think we’re at a turning point when it comes to medical innovation. Our tools are improving rapidly, but our ambitions to use them have fallen behind. Science funding has slowed down, aid budgets have been slashed, and immigration restrictions mean we’re driving away expertise. Even when things have come back online, the disruption and loss of expertise will make it hard to return to our previous trajectory. We could be doing so much more. Medical innovation might not seem urgent in the abstract, but most of us know someone whose life it could change, and eventually I think it affects us all. We can change that.

That’s part of the motivation for my writing on global health and medical innovation at Works in Progress and my work on clinical trial reform at the Abundance and Growth Fund, but the talk is also larger than that: it’s a call to arms for more people to work on medical innovation, and explains why you don’t have to be a scientist to do it.

I hope you enjoy it!

Reading list

The talk covers lots of topics I’ve previously written about or covered in podcast episodes. Here’s a list if you’d like to read more:

• The Golden Age of vaccine development The first vaccine was a lucky accident. Now we can design new vaccines in weeks, atom by atom. [Works in Progress]
• Death rates from cardiovascular disease have fallen dramatically Over a century of progress in surgery, drugs, prevention, and emergency response has driven down death rates from heart disease and stroke. [Our World in Data]
• Childhood leukemia: how a deadly cancer became treatable Before the 1970s, most children affected by leukemia would quickly die from it. Now, most children in rich countries are cured. [Our World in Data]
• Why we didn’t get a malaria vaccine sooner (written with Rachel Glennerster & Siddhartha Haria) Hundreds of thousands of people die from malaria each year, but it took 141 years to develop a vaccine for it. [Works in Progress]
• Lenacapavir: the miracle drug that could end AIDS (episode co-hosted with Jacob Trefethen) Saloni and Jacob talk about the development and prospects for this new drug, as well as the history of HIV, the initial discovery of retroviruses, and how HIV was transformed from a death sentence to a manageable condition. [Hard Drugs]
• Should everyone be taking statins? (episode co-hosted with Jacob Trefethen) Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, but it’s also one of medicine’s biggest success stories. [Hard Drugs]
• Medical breakthroughs in 2025 An end-of-year round up of the biggest news in biotech and medicine that I wrote last year. [Scientific Discovery]

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