YouSaid · the spoken record

Dr. James Field

lines on the record: 10
first: 2020-03-03
most recent: 2020-03-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“With computational biology still largely in its early stages and constituting a small share of the nearly $35 billion in annual global venture capital funding in healthcare, the jury may still be out on its long-term ability to customize therapeutics, revise drug compositions, or sequence the human genome. But we do know two things. Computer power and algorithms continue to improve. And what we know about how biology works is accelerating. Computational biology is sitting at the intersection of those two trends, promising to transform industries up in business models, and most importantly, radically improve healthcare across the globe. We'll be back with another episode next month where we'll look at the role of nuclear power in sustainability. Until then, I'm Heath Terry with Golden Sachs Investment Research. Thanks for listening.”
2020-03-03 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Computational Biology is Transforming Drug R&D · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or six years ago when we first started investing in these spaces, you know, a lot of the established kind of vanguard of investors kind of scoffed and laughed at us. And now it feels like almost every other week those same people come to us and ask us for advice and investing in those areas.”
2020-03-03 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Computational Biology is Transforming Drug R&D · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In our research and analysis, we're increasingly seeing computational biology startups position themselves in the way that Dr. Field describes as software platforms that connect related parties in the pharmaceutical development process. By connecting experts in biology with artificial intelligence and machine learning and talent, computational biology companies are aiming to make breakthroughs more efficient and scalable. This could lead to a cut in R&D cost and a streamlining of FDA involvement for drug research and development. That streamlining can disrupt business models is something Xavian has seen firsthand.”
2020-03-03 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Computational Biology is Transforming Drug R&D · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“millions of different designs typically in the real world. It's only the tiniest proportion of the total molecules that you could be exploring. And so you have to have some way in order to make those shots on goal likely to score. And machine learning is the technique that enables you to do that. As your company grows, how do you think about balancing pursuing go-to-market opportunities with also pushing for technological breakthroughs? So there's this wave of technological advance that's sort of entering the world of biotech. And I think this is the thing that maybe offers us a way to do things slightly differently. If we can deploy technology and building out the discovery platforms in a way that the learnings compound over time Will dramatically change the economics of discovering and developing these sort of drug molecules.”
2020-03-03 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Computational Biology is Transforming Drug R&D · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Biology is this incredibly complex, hairy, messy computational biology is a set of tools that enables us to start reasoning with this biological data. And machine learning is this really powerful approach that we can apply onto this domain that enables us to start searching through that biological space in a more rational way. There's always going to remain a degree of the unknown around biological processes more broadly. How does your technology handle this? Machine learning enables us to in silico, interrogate new genetic designs that we've never physically made before and come up with some prediction as to whether those will function well in the real world. And the reason that's really important is because high throughput molecular biology enables you to build and test millions of these different designs physically in the real world in parallel. But even if you're testing”
2020-03-03 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Computational Biology is Transforming Drug R&D · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Colleague Elizabeth Webster, who happens to actually have her PhD in the study of computational biology, connected with Dr. James Field, co-founder and CEO of Lab Genius, a private computational biology company headquartered in London that's become one of the top startups in the field to watch. Lab genius uses proprietary autonomous machine learning technology to aid the discovery of useful proteins for the human body.”
2020-03-03 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Computational Biology is Transforming Drug R&D · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last 15 years or so have shown so many incredible advances in our ability to perturb and almost engineer biology or perturb chemistry and create these enormous data sets of high reproducibility, of high fidelity and massive scale that really 20 years ago were unimaginable. And so when you couple that with something like ML or AI, it feels like we're at the precipice of what I think will be a multi-decade revolution in how biology and chemistry are fundamentally practiced.”
2020-03-03 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Computational Biology is Transforming Drug R&D · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our bodies contain trillions of cells and therefore trillions of pieces of information, most of which we still don't understand. Over the past two decades, we've been able to access some of that data, genetic sequences, protein profiles, and molecular interaction networks, for example. But understanding that data has been a time-consuming and expensive process. Computational biology changes that. It applies algorithms and statistical models to biological data. It leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to make better, faster sense of our biological system. Computational biology has ramifications across healthcare. It can help find new drugs faster, design new proteins to cure diseases, and accelerate our understanding of genetic code to help prevent diseases before they strike. The potential for computational biology in its wide range of applications has made it a recurring theme in my conversations with investors. Investors like Xavian”
2020-03-03 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Computational Biology is Transforming Drug R&D · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we connected with not just lab geniuses, founder, Dr. James Field, but also Xavier at Lux Capital, who also was invested in lab genius, Lux Capital is one of these really early stage venture capital firms that is sort of known for wanting to invest in science fiction level technologies. And so we started digging on that side and then got really lucky as we were talking about this to some of our colleagues internally to find out Not only do we have all of these resources to learn about this outside the firm, we also happen to have a PhD fellow, Elizabeth Webster, inside the firm who did her thesis on computational biology. And so we got lucky there.”
2020-03-03 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Computational Biology is Transforming Drug R&D · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, computational biology is fascinating. It's the intersection of biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and robotics. One of our very first VCH reports looked at regenerative medicine, which is an area that's relatively close to this one. And in conversation with Nathan Beniat, who's the founder of Air Street Capital, a venture capital firm that's focused specifically on artificial intelligence. And he had just invested in a company called Lab Genius, which was a computational biology company. And to be honest with you, a term that we hadn't even heard before. And so one of the things that we do when we look at this is we look at the data. We actually build essentially a word cloud looking at terms that are showing up in venture capital for the first time. And for the first time in 2019, computational biology showed up on that. Showed up out of the cloud. Exactly.”
2020-03-03 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Computational Biology is Transforming Drug R&D · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT