In the late 1990s, much of oncology regarded cancer immunology as closer to mysticism than science. Jedd Wolchok, MD, PhD, was among the few who connected the early signals into a case that the immune system could control cancer.

On this episode of Precision Signals, Sean Khozin, MD, MPH, speaks with Dr. Wolchok, Meyer Director of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine. Dr. Wolchok was instrumental in the clinical development of ipilimumab, the first approved immune checkpoint inhibitor, led the clinical development of combined CTLA-4 and PD-1 blockade, and led the work that defined the immune-related response criteria.

The conversation covers the mentors who shaped his career, the evidence that sustained the field through years of skepticism, why tumors can appear to grow before they respond, the search for better biomarkers, the role of AI in understanding tumor biology and measuring response, cell therapy for solid tumors, and his work bringing clinical trials to patients in Brooklyn and Queens.

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 policy

A 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.