MAHA summit highlights innovations reshaping American healthcare
The second Make America Healthy Again Summit brought together dozens of leading voices on the frontier of innovation in healthcare to tackle familiar MAHA priorities, including reversing the chronic disease epidemic and giving Americans greater control over their health.
MAHA Action cofounder and President Tony Lyons underscored that mission in his opening remarks.
“The chronic disease epidemic is the defining domestic crisis of our generation and ending it is our greatest shared mission,” Lyons said.
The summit featured back-to-back panel discussions on 14 topics, including psychedelics in medicine, democratizing care, healthcare affordability, artificial intelligence and early cancer detection.
The psychedelics panel addressed an epidemic within the epidemic: mental health.
Roughly one in six American adults, or 16.6%, reported currently taking antidepressants in a 2026 study led by a Harvard Medical School professor. But according to Kabir Nath, CEO of biotechnology company Compass Pathways, 4 million Americans still suffer from treatment-resistant depression, meaning conventional treatments have failed to sufficiently relieve their symptoms.
“That’s somebody typically who’s had depression for a decade or more, has had multiple episodes, and in our studies, the current episode is lasting three to four years,” Nath said. “So these are people who have not found relief from any medicines. They’re at high risk for suicidality.”
Nath and the other panelists lead companies working to make psychedelic medicines — under medical supervision and in a controlled setting — an option for mental health treatment, as they believe the field suffers from a lack of options for patients. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, more commonly known as SSRIs, became widely used in the 1990s and have remained one of the most commonly prescribed treatments for depression.
“What’s missing from current possibilities? Something that works quickly. Most things that exist today work slowly. Something that’s durable, and something that you can take infrequently but has sustained effect,” Nath said.
Nath said Compass anticipates launching its psilocybin-based treatment for treatment-resistant depression in early 2027. Rob Barrow, the CEO of Definium Therapeutics, also anticipates drug approvals for next year.
While AI and healthcare had a panel of its own, nearly every discussion touched on how emerging technologies are reshaping both the American healthcare system and the way individuals manage their own health.
That was true in the discussion of “Prevention, Earlier Detection, and a New Future for Cancer.”
GRAIL is a healthcare company that has developed a simple blood test that can detect over 50 types of cancer.
“We can screen for them before symptoms develop,” said GRAIL CEO Josh Ofman. “It’s because of advances in human genomics and advances in AI that have enabled us to do that.”
Ofman said those advancements could help shift healthcare from relying on snapshots of a person’s health at individual points in time toward a more complete understanding of how their health changes over time.
“A huge change that we could not have done five or 10 years ago in the whole diagnostics industry [is] to move away from these single snapshot views of our health to the ‘movie,’ which really provides us biological intelligence or biological surveillance, so that we can survey the biology of an individual over time,” he said.
The summit’s dedicated AI and healthcare panel took those questions further, examining how the technology could change access to care, the work of healthcare professionals and the system itself.
Virgílio Bento, CEO and founder of Sword, a company that delivers AI care with clinical oversight to promote whole-body health, argued that AI could expand access to healthcare by delegating work to AI and automating tasks that currently require clinicians, freeing them to devote more attention to patients and tasks that require human care.
“The promise of AI healthcare is removing all barriers in terms of access to care,” Bento said, pointing to the labor-intensive nature of healthcare as a barrier to care. “We believe that AI in this context can be the great equalizer in healthcare … and that’s what we are working towards: building a world where the poorest person in the U.S. has access to the same high-quality healthcare as the richest person.”
However, Nick Perry, cofounder and CEO of Candid Health, a company working to automate medical billing and claims processing, emphasized the importance of orchestration — coordinating AI agents, other tools and processes — and being selective about where AI is best used.
“The orchestration part of AI is I think a really, really important part of the problem because if AI is the only tool you use, it’s a very expensive tool and it’s not perfect,” Perry said. “How do you make sure you’re using the agents in exactly the right place in the most cost-efficient bit and the most cost-efficient way?”
Syed Mohiuddin, head of healthcare at Anthropic, can envision a future where AI can do some of clinicians’ work and even address physician shortages — but doesn’t see that future as immediate.
“To get there, very importantly, we have to make sure it actually works at every step of the way, and we have to continue to train the models to be maximally effective, and then to integrate the system. Because what you can’t have is models that are good, but a system that doesn’t know how to use it,” Mohiuddin said. “That’s where time and diffusion actually matter more than the technology itself, right?”
“We have to be very backed by taking a hyper-safe, hyper-responsible approach,” Mohiuddin added. “There is no industry that is more important than healthcare, and there is no more important thing we could do with this technology than allow for people to be healthier.”
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