What will define 2026, according to leaders in space, healthcare, and AI

Back in November, Fast Company and Johns Hopkins partnered for the first-ever World Changing Ideas Summit in Washington, DC, an event that convened leaders across business and academia to engage with the ideas and innovations reshaping the future.

Knowing we were heading into a new year that undoubtedly is bringing new challenges to every industry, we asked some of our speakers working in space, healthcare, AI, and the intersections therein, what would be top of mind for them in 2026:

“We’re in a race against resistance.”

Akhila Kosaraju, founder and CEO of Pharebio, is using predictive and generative AI to power drug discovery. The startup plans to develop 15 new antibiotics by 2030 that will outpace microbial resistance and cure common but difficult to treat illnesses such as E. coli and C. diff. For Kosaraju, the biggest challenge is time.

“We’re in a race against resistance,” she says, noting it can take fewer than six years for bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics. Meanwhile, it can take 13 years—more than double that time—to develop new medicine.

“The biggest challenge for us is getting these antibiotics into preclinical and then ultimately clinical development, and FDA approved. I think you’ll hear this across AI for drug discovery—there is an impatience to make sure that these AI models are actually working and that patients actually start seeing those results,” she says. “So our team is laser focused on not just building the best model for its own sake, but really ensuring that we are truly accelerating timelines to get these drugs developed, that these drugs are more novel, less toxic, and more efficacious than what currently exists.”

“If we don’t have a solution, America’s presence in space will stop.”

Saleem Miyan, CEO of Max Space, a company developing new space stations in partnership with the U.S. government and NASA, believes it’s essential for both American innovation and security to expand the nation’s presence in space—especially given that the International Space Station will be decommissioned in 2030.

“That will mean, if we don’t have a solution, America’s presence in space will stop—and we don’t want that to happen,” Miyan says. “As a result of that, we’re putting an awful lot of time, energy, effort, [and] investor’s capital, to make sure that people understand quite how important being in space is, remaining in space is.”

And there’s no shortage of opportunities for Max Space to capitalize on, Miyan says.

“We’re seeing so much attention right now from all governments around the world to get the next space race won, and we’re doing everything we can to make sure that America maintains that position,” he says. “I think in order to do that, we have to make sure that we are continuing to evolve these incredible ideas that companies like ours have developed from the concept all the way through to productization, so that we as a nation maintain this strength and dominance that we’ve always had—not just in exploration but also in defense.”

“…space is open for innovation.”

“We’re trying to get the message out that space is open for innovation,” says Molly Mulligan, Chief Operating Officer of SpaceMD, a subsidiary of Redwire Space. The company, which formed in August 2025, is focused on accelerating drug creation by removing gravity from the growth process of antibody crystals.

“At Space MD, that’s really the goal: to take the science of making better drugs in space and apply that here on Earth to actually make drugs that are commercially available for people,” Mulligan says.

SpaceMD’s mission takes inspiration from the success of Keytruda, an immunotherapy drug created by pharmaceutical company Merck whose crystals were grown on the International Space Station—a process they are hoping to replicate in the coming years.

“We want to be the company that takes that next drug through the whole process. And we’re working on that today, trying to take a drug from growing the crystals in space all the way through the preclinical process to an investigational new drug form for the FDA,” she says. “So that’s really top of mind for us is being the company that does that with the second drug and the third drug and a fourth drug to help people every day here on earth.”

“…patients are waiting for new medicines today.”

Isomorphic Labs, the AI-powered drug company spun out of Google DeepMind, has an audacious goal of solving all diseases using AI. The key to doing so largely rests with its AlphaFold AI system which can predict the complex structure of proteins and model how they might internet with, say, DNA or drugs. The discovery earned Google DeepMind the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry. And this past July, the company announced it’s “very close” to human trials.

“As we move to the new year, we all know that patients are waiting for new medicines today,” says Ben Wolf, chief medical officer at Isomorphic Labs. Wolf joined the company in June and says his focus is advancing Isomorphic Labs into “an industry leading clinical pipeline.” Wolf says their initial focus is oncology and immunology.

“One of the challenges is just the heterogeneic [and] intractable nature of many diseases like cancer. So they’re very challenging to crack,” Wolf says.

What will be imperative for Isomorphic Labs is coupling AI-based approaches to drug development with precision medicine paradigms, i.e. tailoring treatment to specific patients instead of a one-size-fits-all approach.

“Ultimately that will give us the capacity to quickly make safer and more effective medicines for all patients,” Wolf says.