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Sajith Wickramasekara

lines on the record: 77
first: 2025-11-13
most recent: 2025-11-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Over time. And so we sort of view this as being able to unlock memory for these organizations and help make scientific data reusable over time.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It works over benchling data with the context of the benchling data model. And so it enables scientists to ask these very difficult, and science is fundamentally about like asking and answering questions. And so for our customers, it helps them to do a type of question that previous in the past would have taken weeks or months to do that in just a couple hours. So a great example of this is with a customer that was getting ready to run some mouse studies. And they were looking at 20 different mouse models and they used a deep research, our deep research capability to look at all the historical mouse studies that they had run. And it turned out that a bunch of the mouse models that they were about to like investigate, which would have taken eight months, huge cost, big experiment to run, someone had already done before, and it was trapped in some lab notebook from many years ago from a company that had been bought. And all the people were long gone. And so there's so much of science that lives in folklore and institutional knowledge and that's kind of lost.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Benchling AI has kind of two major components to it. The first is tools for simulation. So this is taking open source, proprietary companies' internal models and making them accessible to scientists directly in their workflow. So the right model at the right moment in the scientific workflow already set up so that a wet lab scientist without computational skills can use it effectively. And then the results are linked to all of their other information in benchling. And then we also see that laddering up to being able to help scientists recommend like help recommend for scientists the next best experiment to run based on all the work they've done in the past plus all the public literature available. And so we think it's like an exciting way to approach the co-scientist problem. Then the other facet of benchling AI is agents that automate work for you. And so we've released this deep research agent. It works similar to the deep research agents from Anthropic and other foundation labs. But what it does is”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the core science for GLP1s was kind of sitting on the shelf in some sense. Like it's been known since the 90s. And so it took some insights and conviction and then all of a sudden like we have this category defining medicine that's going to go on to probably be the best-selling drug of all time. And that's happening. And then K-Treat is a similar story where there's a molecule that's gone through a couple different acquisitions. And it's almost like it's at the bottom of some list to be like outliced and sold off. People are giving up on it.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think, like, again, because we know so little about biology and there are so many failures in that space. And again, running a clinical trial for obesity where you need huge populations of people that you monitor for very long periods of time, like super, super expensive. Everything has failed before. Pharma companies generally aren't willing to underwrite that stuff sometimes. I mean, neurodegenerative diseases are the same way. Alzheimer's is this graveyard of billion dollar failures and like getting back in now. But there's a period of time where everyone left the space.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So the returns to intelligence are very high. And I think like the stories of GLP1s and QTrudar are like great examples of that. So GLP1s obviously just transformed obesity as like a treatable disease when, by the way, it was like a totally unfundable category of things like five years ago”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think those two stories are really interesting A great quote from Dario the Anthropic CEO and his kind of essay about the returns to intelligence in scientific progress are very high. Are you”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You would invest in the system. Totally. Yeah. If you were setting out to build a company that was going to wanted to build the next great pharma company and have a whole portfolio of medicines, you'd probably care a lot about that. But that's such a high capital long-term, high risk thing to do. It's very hard. And after seven, eight years and you have some good clinical data, like, do I roll the dice again and keep going for another 10 or do I sell? So I think because it's so artisanal, there's this huge opportunity now with AI to get more shots on goal, faster, cheaper, make better molecules, and then bring them to the clinic safely and faster. And I think that's the big opportunity. People get very focused on clinical trials because they're like the biggest line item. And they're important, don't get me wrong, but I think it's actually a bit of a red herring where, yes, there are operational problems. Like some studies are designed badly. It's hard to recruit patients. Sticker prices really big. But at the end of the day, like a lot of molecules.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All about collecting data. All of that's basically bespoke and invented one off by every company. It's because those companies are playing kind of a sort of a one-time game because the process is so long that you're sort of just trying to survive until you get six, seven years in. You show some clinical success. And a pharma company comes and buys you. So you're not really like building for scale and building for durability.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was while we had all these new categories of medicines being kind of invented over the last decade, I think that's important and it's here to stay, but the industry has to change, like the pressure on biotech to be faster and cheaper is just higher than it's ever been before. I think a lot of that cost comes from how artisanal the industry is. Like biotech is this place where if you look, I'll sort of take the digital and physical realms for a second, they've actually done a good job of systematizing the physical realm. You brought up sequencing earlier, like Illumina's put sequencers on every single bench, every single lab, and now sequencing is accessible tool to all of science. You could say the same thing has happened with different reagents and lab consumables and things like that. But if you look at like the digital realm where it's like how people collaborate, how data is structured and shared, the workflows that are used in science, which is”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not, yeah, the rest of healthcare is very labor dependent and labor generally gets more expensive over time. I'm very optimistic for AI to help help there too. But drugs are this amazing thing. We should want more of them. And then we get to stockpile more and more of these amazing medicines. But it takes over $2 billion, generally about 10 years to bring a medicine to market. And most of those medicines will fail very late in this process. You get seven to ten years in. You've spent hundreds of millions of dollars and clinical trial fails. Medicine's not safe or not effective. And so it's unbelievably like difficult pursuit. It is probably easier at this point to send things to space or to put people on the moon than it is to get a new medicine approved. And I know $2 billion probably isn't that, you know, I feel like AI is desensitized us all. You know, everything is like $100 billion data centers and whatever. Like $2 billion. Like what's that? But when there's that high of a failure rate, it's very difficult for investors to underwrite that.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we'll link it in the show. Absolutely. Yeah, I think like maybe to step back, like one thing I just wish people would appreciate more is like medicines are medicines are magic, I think. I think like we take for granted how awesome medicines are Think 9% of healthcare spent. Prescription drug sales are 9% of healthcare spending in the US. Like we have obviously this healthcare cost problem, but drugs are this amazing ROI. And the best part about drugs is they go generic. So a drug today is only going to get cheaper over time and it works just as effectively. I take a statin today that probably costs like nothing. And like 20 years ago, it was some expensive medicine.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think I believe that now, and it's really interesting to see the general public, big tech startups, the model labs, everyone is saying like AI is going to cure disease. So it's very good that everyone's excited by that.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a mixed bag. I think there's some folks who are like it's kind of inspired that American biotechn needs to be faster, cheaper, more competitive. There's some more nationalistic reactions, I think, of like, hey, like, well, there's different regulatory or ethical standards over there. Are the data, are they all going to replicate so some skepticism as well? But by and large, I think it's like very much here to stay that China is going to be like a major, major biotic player.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The data is probably not going to replicate. It might not be real, but like J&J, I think, saw it and realized how promising it was. And they've taken it. And it's actually a”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the most notable medicines that people might recognize is called carvicti. And it's a Johnson Johnson medicine. So Johnson& Johnson partnered with a Chinese biotech called Legend Biotech. They saw the data that Legend presented. And it was a time when people were pretty suspicious. And so they were like, it's like.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Yeah, yeah. These are the biggest companies in the world, the Merx and Pfizers and Lily's and so forth. Many of them have gone to China and bought molecules that historically they would have bought from American biotechs.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so if the last decade was about sort of biologics and these new modalities, I think the next is going to be about speeding costs. People want more drugs and they want them cheaper. And China is very good at things related to speed and cost. And so all of a sudden in the last couple of years, you've seen this rise of Chinese biotech companies that are able to create molecules and bring them to patients in clinical trials in China just early phases of clinical development really fast and really cheap, even in some of these new modalities. And so seeing this huge uptick in pharma going to China and buying molecules that they typically would have bought from American biotechs.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Then people expected. Absolutely. Or then investors expected. Absolutely. Maybe the scientists. In 2021, every biotech was getting told by investors, like, you need to build a platform company that's going to cure a bunch of different diseases. And here's hundreds of millions of dollars and capital is free. And investors can change their strategies a lot faster than companies can. And a lot of those companies, because they were taking such a big risk on like a new form of technology, we're going to be the next RNA company, Nextcel therapy company, they picked diseases that might have been like simpler problems to solve with smaller patient populations. And then all of a sudden, investors changed their minds. Platforms are no longer valuable. You're working on a thing that is just supposed to be a proof of concept and all of a sudden it's like defining you. And so it's a really tough spot for those companies to be in.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. New like, I would call them kind of categories or form factors of medicines and the modalities is the word. But like, you know, the last decade actually, maybe even longer of biotech has really been this story of new categories of medicines being sort of invented and taken to patients. And some of these, like there are approved gene editing medicines, there are approved cell therapies where you're reprogramming the patient's immune system. There are approved gene therapies. There's approved mRNA medicines. So these are real categories. I think investors and companies got very excited and put a lot of money into these categories. And we're kind of in the trough of disillusionment for some of them now.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like I would say there's a lot of generalist excitement for gene editing, selling gene therapies, RNA, and all of these”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. And I'm definitely not a sort of macro specialist, otherwise I'd probably be an investor or something like that. But it's all your customers. Yeah, it is. I would say like biotech has, it is definitely an industry that has gone through cycles. We're probably like the last couple years are probably like the equivalent of like the dot-com bust happening for biotech. Yeah, it's been a tough time. COVID was sort of the peak when mRNA was this thing that kind of like reopened the world. And there's a lot of generalist money that came in and a lot of exuberance and excitement. And it's not, you know, the sort of dot-com bust equivalent wasn't just because of that. There was, you know, changes in interest rates, tariffs, regulatory uncertainty. China, a bunch of different factors, and some including like scientific technologies that we got really, really excited about that are still very important and promising but maybe haven't become commercially successful as fast as people wanted. So a whole confluence of factors there, but a bunch of”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The scientific data that comes out of the lab. So everything from all the different types of molecules that are being created to how they're related to the work that went into creating them, to the different types of tests that you're running on them, to the data coming back from the animals, to the scale-up data coming out of the fermenters when you're figuring out the process to manufacture it, all of that incredibly rich in heterogeneous scientific data has to be brought together in one place, organized, made searchables that scientists can make decisions based on it.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what's really interesting for everyone to understand is like making a draw, there's like 9,000 909 steps in making a drug after you come up with molecules. You have to make a medicine, you have to find a biologically meaningful target in the body, something you want a drug, design a molecule, to optimize that molecule, you have to test that molecule in petri dishes and cell lines and animals, various kinds of animals. Then eventually you get to the point where you can take it to a clinical trial and you're testing it in subsequently larger groups of humans all the while you're figuring out how do I manufacture this thing and develop a process to make it scale economically safety with the high with quality all while navigating regulatory bodies so that eventually in seven to ten years you can have a drug that you give to people commercially and even then there's still still more work there so it's just incredibly long and complex and we're benchling focuses is all”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like Moderna and Snofi and Eli Lily and Regeneron, but also like cutting edge biotech startups, the future AI biotechs like isomorphic labs and Zera and companies like that. So we get to see the innovation happening across the entire biotech sector and build software that helps power it.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know. So I'm a software engineer by background, but I worked in a biology lab. I was like really interested in medicine and coming from the world of software. And software developers have amazing tools for working on code and for collaborating. And when I got to the biology lab, I found that scientists had paper notebooks and spreadsheets that would sit on their desktops and like it was terrible. And so it was really hard to work together. And I think I was really frustrating for me personally. And I thought a little bit naive at the time. I thought, how hard would it be to build good tools for scientists? And so I started working on benchling, which helped scientists design molecules, plan their experiments out, run those experiments in the lab, get the data, organize it, analyze it, and then share it with their colleagues. Today we work with about 1,300 biotech and pharma companies, scientists at over 7,000 academic institutions, universities all around the world. And our software powers household name.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. I'm one of the co-founders of Benchling. We make modern software for scientific progress. So started the company about 13 years ago. It's been a long time.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT