The Patient is Not a Document: Foundation Models for Biomedical AI with Standard BioModel

In this episode of Data in Biotech, host Ross Katz sits down with Kevin Brown, co-founder of Standard BioModel, to explore one of the most ambitious projects in biomedical AI, building a multimodal foundation model that represents the full complexity of a patient across time.

Drawing on a career spanning brain-computer interfaces, computer-aided diagnosis at Siemens Healthineers, and oncology data science at Bristol Myers Squibb, Kevin shares the scientific and philosophical journey that led him to a single conviction: a patient is not a document. Rather than reducing a patient to clinical notes, ICD-10 codes, or isolated test results, Standard BioModel's approach maps every available modality - CT imaging, digital pathology, genomics, EKGs, longitudinal EHR data - into a shared latent space, and models how that patient moves through time.

The result is a framework designed not just for prediction, but for counterfactual reasoning, clinical trial matching, and personalized intervention, with open-source models already being validated across leading academic medical centers.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

>> Why reducing a patient to text - clinical notes, radiology reports, genomic assay summaries - and how mapping multimodal data into a shared latent embedding space preserves information that never makes it into the written record

>> How Standard BioModel's temporal architecture models patients as trajectories through an abstract embedding space rather than static snapshots, enabling counterfactual reasoning about the likely impact of interventions on a patient's future health trajectory

>> Why no single foundation model can own every clinical vertical and how building a highly generalizable base model that facilitates downstream fine-tuning is a more defensible and scalable strategy than building narrow, application-specific models

>> How the model handles missing modalities in real-world clinical settings, and why the architecture is designed to function effectively even when not every data type is available for every patient

>> Why Standard BioModel has chosen to open-source its models and why broad, institution-specific validation across diverse patient populations is not just a scientific priority, but a prerequisite for trustworthy clinical AI

Meet our guest:

Kevin Brown is the Founder and CEO of Standard Model Biomedicine, where he builds foundation models for biomedicine. He previously led AI work as Director of Artificial Intelli