DR. KAMRAN KHAN

Founder and CEO of BlueDot Inc.

Fighting Diseases with Machine Learning and AI

by Helen Jacob

Dr. Kamran Khan is a leading expert in outbreaks as an infectious disease physician, a public health physician, and a professor at the University of Toronto. He’s treated patients from all around the world. This ultimately led him to the work that he’s been doing over the last 20 years in emerging infectious diseases. As founder of BlueDot, he leads a company that seeks to protect people from infectious diseases using human and artificial intelligence technology.

Can you tell me a little bit about your background, and what sparked your interest in the field of infectious diseases?

I really got interested in the field of emerging infectious diseases in 1999 when I was doing my training in New York. West Nile virus showed up in North America, which was a virus that didn't exist here before 1999. I watched it establish itself and spread across the continent.

Two years later in 2001, anthrax is weaponized and sent through the U.S. Postal System, and that was a reminder that infectious disease outbreaks and threats don't necessarily have to come from Mother Nature, that they can come from deliberate acts.

Then I moved to Toronto, which is home, back in 2003, and we had the SARS outbreak, which lasted four months. It really was a bit of an eye-opening experience for me at the very beginning of my career. It was a recognition, having experienced three infectious disease emergencies in the span of four years, that there were going to be more of these to come.

Let’s turn to BlueDot. What is BlueDot and how does it work?

I was seeing other sectors using data, machine learning, and advanced analytics in ways that we weren't necessarily using in public health or in healthcare. So, I founded BlueDot as a company in 2013, and we’ve been building a global infectious disease intelligence platform for the last nine years.

The platform has three key pillars, all founded on diverse global data and advanced analytics on that data. The first pillar is focused on early detection of infectious disease threats around the world. The second pillar is focused on understanding those threats: which threats require our immediate attention, and which ones do not. The third pillar is about taking that intelligence and integrating it into the workflows of our clients, which are both in government as well as in the private sector, so that they can have this immediate situational awareness around the clock so that they can take timely actions to protect the health and well-being of citizens in a country.

What are some hurdles you had to face while figuring out the logistics for BlueDot?

We are tackling a very complex problem. Infectious diseases sound like one thing, but it's actually a very diverse mix of many things. COVID is very different than Ebola, which is different from Zika. They're all quite distinct.

This requires a very diverse set of skills, including subject matter expertise, understanding infectious diseases, and immunology, epidemiology, and biology. Then, you need to be able to integrate those skills and expertise with those who have advanced knowledge of machine learning, engineering, and software development and technology.

Maybe one of the hardest aspects of this is integrating intelligence into people's workflows in terms of how they make decisions, especially when not everyone is an expert in the field of infectious diseases. There are many different types of hurdles, but we're not tackling this problem because it's easy. We're doing it because it's hard. I'm paraphrasing JFK here, but this is ultimately why we're tackling this problem, because it is extremely important. //