The Cave: Pharma's Data Problem

Dave Johnson’s first pharma job wasn't in a lab. It was in a room, dark and cramped, stacked floor to ceiling with 30 years of decaying discovery chemistry data on every storage medium imaginable.

They called it “the cave.”

A physicist turned data leader, Dave has spent two decades solving the same problem: scientific data is generated for one purpose, poorly captured, and left abandoned.

Now co-founding Dash Bio after years leading data science at Moderna, Dave joins Thomas to make a case the industry would rather not hear: AI pilots keep failing because organizations can't understand their own data or tell whether anything they build improves how they work.

Listen in to hear:

• Why "the cave" is still an accurate description of how most pharma companies manage data
• Why clinical trial numbers mean nothing without the metadata behind them
• How the US needs to treat China’s clinical trial volume as a wake-up call