Andrew Le
Andrew Le is an American medical researcher. He research and publishes his work on AI use in healthcare and brain cancer.
Life and education
He was born in the United States to Vietnamese immigrants who escaped Vietnam by boat in 1979. He attended Taylor High School, where he actively participated in charity work, raising funds for shelters after Hurricane Katrina.He pursued higher education at Harvard College, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He then earned his doctorate of medicine from Harvard Medical School, specializing in neurosurgery.
Career and research
During his medical training, he observed patients frequently resorting to online symptom searches, leading to misinformation and potential harm to their health. While a third-year medical resident at Harvard Medical School in 2014, Le co-founded Buoy Health with his colleague Eddie Reyes. He developed an AI-powered digital health tool that would function as a health-specific search engine, offering patients information and guidance.Le and his colleagues gathered enough data to educate the algorithm by hand-reading the 18,000-plus articles, then developing an algorithm to crunch the figures in real-time for everyone.
He looked at 100 standardized cases with 33 varied diagnoses, ranging from a harmless cough to a potentially fatal pulmonary embolism, as well as the incidence of uncommon illnesses like histoplasmosis and the common cold.
He has led Buoy through two successful investment rounds, raising over $67 million with healthcare investors like Optum, Cigna, Humana, and WR Hambrecht + Co, since establishing the firm out of Harvard Innovation Labs in 2014.