GeneDx CEO Katherine Stueland emphasizes that while AI is revolutionizing health care, human effort and systemic changes are essential to significantly extend children’s life spans. She identifies three key factors to reaching this goal: widespread newborn screening for rare diseases, improved regulatory support for personalized therapies, and broad access to diagnostics and treatments.
Artificial intelligence has already proved a game-changer for the health care industry, but the CEO of one genetic testing company says humans still need to play their part if the life span of children is to be drastically improved.
Speaking to Fortune on the sidelines of the BrainstormAI conference in London this week, Katherine Stueland, the president and CEO of GeneDx, says three major factors will determine whether the next generation will live to see 100.
This is an outlook held by JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who told Bloomberg TV in 2023: “Your children are going to live to 100 and not have cancer because of technology, and literally they’ll probably be working three and a half days a week.”
Stueland, who took on the top job at the Connecticut-based business in 2021, said humanity cannot rely on AI alone if it wants to meet Dimon’s speculation.
GeneDx is disrupting the medical diagnostics industry with its database of approximately 750,000 sequences across exomes and genomes, which interprets around 1.5 million samples.
The business offers rapid testing—some results can be turned around in a matter of days—to patients of all ages, but it is diagnosing rare diseases in children that could prove fundamental to extending life spans.
The first of three hurdles to reach a 100-year goal is to get to a place where newborn screening for rare diseases becomes the norm, said Stueland.
In October, GeneDx published the initial results from its Genomic Uniform-screening Against Rare Diseases In All Newborns (GUARDIAN) study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, having screened 4,000 babies, enabling diagnosis and treatment for more than 250 conditions.
Of the patients, 3.7% had positive screenings, meaning clinical intervention could begin earlier than it may have typically.
“Preventing disease progression, I would say, gets us to that 100-year lifespan,” Stueland said. “But the reality is today, we went back…to those conditions where we found a positive [and found] the average age of diagnosis historically was seven to 11 years.
“For some of these conditions if you’re not catching it early, it can progress [and be deadly].”
Stueland, who was named in was named in CNBC’s 2025 Changemakers: Women Transforming Business list, added that the next piece of the puzzle is improving regulatory framework for individualized therapy.
GeneDx worked with the parents of one child, named Mila, who died at the age of 10.
“Mila was diagnosed at age 5,” Stueland said. “She was one of the first examples of an individualized gene therapy. That helped alleviate her symptoms for a period of time that unfortunately did not cure her, but it gave her more time on this earth with her family.
“So we need to be able to figure out how to have the regulatory framework for new therapies.”
Stueland continued: “The third part is making sure that there is good access for all of these diagnostic tests and for the therapies on the other end, so people can actually benefit from it.
“Ultimately, if we get to this place of newborn screening and you start to have a symptom and we can diagnose on demand, that’s gonna help us get to that place where we’re living longer.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
