Her Grandmother's Alzheimer's Changed Everything. Now She's Fixing How New Drugs Are Tested!

Every new medicine has to pass through a clinical trial, and most of those trials are still designed in 200-page Word documents that teams retype by hand. Vivian DeWoskin is working to change that.

Vivian is Chief Commercial Officer of Faro AI, the company bringing AI to how clinical trials are designed, backed by a $37.3M Series B in 2026. Her path started at home: watching her grandmother live with Alzheimer's made her ask what makes a person a person. That question took her to neuroscience at Princeton, where she taught herself to code in the lab, then into healthcare consulting, the launch of the first CAR-T therapy for adults with large B-cell lymphoma, and strategy at Komodo Health before joining Faro.

In this episode of Inspiring Women, Laurie McGraw asks her where AI can genuinely speed up drug development, where it never will, and how to build a team that succeeds even when you are not in the room.

IN THIS EPISODE

- Why a grandmother's Alzheimer's led to a career in neuroscience

- Teaching yourself to code with no experience

- Why she left consulting to operate, and what launching a first-of-its-kind therapy taught her

- Why clinical trial protocols run to hundreds of pages, and what that costs patients

- Treating protocols as data, and why that unlocks AI

- The one thing AI cannot replace: clinical judgment

- Setting a company up for scale when the founder isn't in the room

- Leading in line with your values

CHAPTERS

0:00 Trailer

1:04 Introduction

2:10 Her grandmother, Alzheimer's and what makes a person a person

3:20 Neuroscience at Princeton

6:27 Learning to code in the lab

7:55 From research to healthcare consulting and Komodo Health

10:33 Choosing to operate: business development

12:13 Joining Faro

14:41 What Faro does and why clinical trials need it

15:22 200-page protocols and the data problem

17:41 Studies designed in Microsoft Word

18:11 Treating protocols as data

19:27 Making trials faster

21:50 What AI can't replace

23:12 Leadership at the next stage of growth

25:43 What matters most as an inspiring woman

27:53 Thank you

ABOUT THE GUEST

Vivian DeWoskin is Chief Commercial Officer of Faro AI (formerly Faro Health), where she was first Chief Strategy Officer. She previously held strategy roles at Komodo Health and worked in life-sciences consulting. She studied neuroscience at Princeton.

ABOUT THE SHOW

Inspiring Women with Laurie McGraw is a podcast of honest conversations with women leaders in health, technology and business about how they built their careers and what they've learned along the way.

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