Trends from the Trenches

Bio-IT World
  • 4.9 (27)
  • Science
  • Monthly

Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders. BioTeam co-founder Stan Gloss brings years of industry experience in science, data, and technology to conversations exploring what is driving data and discovery, and what’s coming next.

  1. 4d ago

    Episode: 47 - Curved Air and The Long Road To A Sickle Cell Cure

    A cure can be real and still feel out of reach. Trends from the Trenches host Allison Proffitt is joined by Kevin Davies, executive editor of The CRISPR Journal and author of Curved Air: A Biography of Sickle Cell Anemia and the Quest to Cure the First Molecular Disease. Kevin shares how sickle cell disease became both a landmark genetics story and a test of whether medicine can treat patients with dignity. He follows Victoria Gray’s CRISPR gene therapy success while facing the discrimination, underfunding, and access barriers that still shape sickle cell care.  • Why Curved Air centers sickle cell warriors as the lead characters  • Why gene therapy success does not erase racism and bias in emergency care  • Stories of mistreatment during pain crises and the cost of lost trust  • How sickle cell spread globally through malaria selection and migration  • Why the first molecular disease took decades to reach curative treatment  • Funding gaps compared with cystic fibrosis and what that changes  • How hydroxyurea helps and why better everyday treatments still matter  • What Casgevy demands from patients and why durability monitoring continues  • Why affordability and infrastructure limit global access in Africa and India  • What could come next with in vivo editing and small molecule BCL11A ideas  LINKS https://www.bio-itworld.com/ https://www.bio-itworldexpo.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/bio-it-world https://twitter.com/bioitworld  Host Links Allison Proffitt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allison-proffitt-02138222  Guest Links Kevin Davies LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevindaviesphd/ Curved Air (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/Curved-Air-Biography-Molecular-Disease/dp/0674293967  Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders.

    Episode: 47 - Curved Air and The Long Road To A Sickle Cell Cure

  2. Oct 2

    Episode: 46 - Eric Schadt on Building AI-Native Drug Development And Patient-Facing Care

    Trends from the Trenches host Eleanor Howe sits down with computational biologist Eric Schadt—now an AI Scholar in Residence at Pfizer—who has spent 25 years pushing a simple idea with huge consequences: disease is a network property, not a single-gene problem. That mindset changes what “precision medicine” should mean, shifting the goal from better labels to better treatment decisions that actually improve outcomes for real patients.    They get concrete about how the AI revolution lands inside pharma and biotech. Eric explains what Pfizer’s new AI Scholar role is meant to do, what an AI-native R&D operating model looks like, and why tightly integrated teams of a few humans plus modern foundation models can outperform the old way of working. From multimodal oncology models to reasoning-first LLMs, they talk about agentic systems that can orchestrate many specialized models, not just generate text, and why interpretability and auditable traces matter when clinical decisions are on the line.    If you care about AI in healthcare, precision medicine, clinical decision support, and the future of personalized treatment, this conversation will sharpen how you see the obstacles and the opportunities.   Subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review. What do you think needs to change first: policy, incentives, or technology?  Bio-IT World's Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider's look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders. The hosts bring years of industry experience in science, data, and technology to conversations exploring what is driving data and discovery, and what's coming next.  Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders.

    Episode: 46 - Eric Schadt on Building AI-Native Drug Development And Patient-Facing Care

  3. Aug 25

    Episode: 45 - Ben Busby on Genomics at GPU Speed

    Genomics is moving fast, but how do we get biology the hardware and software it deserves? Ben Busby, NVIDIA’s global alliances manager for omics, joins host Eleanor Howe to dig into the practical crossroads of GPU computing, open-source bioinformatics, and the next wave of precision medicine. They get specific about what GPU acceleration changes in day-to-day genomics and single-cell analysis. Faster pipelines can mean lower costs, tighter iteration loops, and newly feasible questions. They also explore the hardest bottleneck—reliable longitudinal multi-omics data—and challenge a popular assumption about AI in biomedicine: bigger isn’t always better.  Links from this episode:   Bio-IT World BioTeam Diamond Age Data Science NVIDIA  Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders.

    Episode: 45 - Ben Busby on Genomics at GPU Speed

  4. Jul 28

    Episode: 44 - Knowledge Graphs Turning Life Science Data into Answers

    AI is moving fast in life sciences, but a confident answer is not the same thing as a correct, reproducible, auditable answer. Knowledge graphs, ontologies, and FAIR data practices are the keys to bridging this gap. Knowledge3's Tom Plasterer, CEO and co-founder, and Eric Little, chief data officer, join host Allison Proffitt to discuss what it takes to turn semantics into something practical: a knowledge product mindset, modular delivery, and “semantic ops” that can better manage data systems. Their conversation challenges the hype cycle around context graphs, explains why life sciences are a natural starting point for regulated, high-stakes AI, and shows how layered models can capture the right level of context without building a giant monolith that never takes off. Links from this episode:   Bio-IT World BioTeam Bio-IT World Europe Knowledge3  Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders.

    Episode: 44 - Knowledge Graphs Turning Life Science Data into Answers

  5. Jun 23

    Episode: 43 - The Hard Truth about Digital R&D: Patterns, Pitfalls, and the Next Wave of Innovation

    At last month’s Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, Eleanor Howe, founder and CEO of Diamond Age Data Science, presented the Trends with the Trenches session based on gathered input from colleagues, clients, and advisors across the life sciences field. Coding agents were the central topic—how they’re speeding up software development, open source maintenance, and analysis workflows while also shifting new types of responsibility to the human reviewer. Now, “just coding” is no longer enough, and Howe provides advice for early-career scientists on how to get hired in a different environment. Plus, she covers why simulating data can backfire, why smaller purpose-built models often win, and why better data curation, active learning, ELN automation, and federation may matter more than another flashy model demo.  Links from this episode:   Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Bio-IT World BioTeam Diamond Age Data Science    Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders.

    Episode: 43 - The Hard Truth about Digital R&D: Patterns, Pitfalls, and the Next Wave of Innovation

  6. May 19

    Episode: 42 - Adam Marko on AI-Ready Life Sciences Data

    Your AI plan can’t outrun your data. Adam Marko, life science field CTO at Hammerspace, joins the podcast to unpack the problem almost every biotech, pharma, and biomedical research group runs into: unstructured data that are siloed, fragmented, and scattered across storage systems, sites, and clouds. With host Jessica StLouis, they talk through what “data orchestration” means when building an AI-ready data foundation, infrastructure constraints and the tiered storage patterns that help teams keep AI and HPC workloads moving, and why life sciences are in a uniquely tough spot. Plus, Marko shares a preview of his presentation at Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston.   If you care about faster discovery, smoother AI workflows, and fewer manual file moves, subscribe, share this with a colleague, and rate or review so more researchers can find the conversation.  Links from this episode:   From Data Chaos to Discovery: Building the Data Foundation for AI-Ready Scientific Research Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Bio-IT World BioTeam Hammerspace  Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders.

    Episode: 42 - Adam Marko on AI-Ready Life Sciences Data

  7. Apr 28

    Episode: 41 - Sonia Timberlake on Agentic AI for Biotech Coders

    AI is now good enough to change how computational biology teams actually work, but most companies are still adopting it like it’s 2023. Sonia Timberlake, R&D strategy consultant for Timberlake & Maclsaac Biopharma Consulting, speaks with host Eleanor Howe about what’s real: agentic coding, high-throughput data workflows, and the practical limits that still slow teams down. Timberlake digs into benchmarks for capabilities and end-to-end tasks, as well as multimodal chart understanding, source verification, and where human review remains non-negotiable. The conversation also explores beyond AI to what biopharma risks missing, why novel targets still matter, and where investment interest is clustering right now. Plus, tune in to get a preview of Timberlake’s workshop at Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston next month!  If this helped you think more clearly about AI in drug development and computational biology, subscribe, share the show with a colleague, and leave a review so more builders can find the conversation.  Links from this episode:   Workshop: AI Upskilling for Computational Biology Teams Bio-IT World BioTeam Diamond Age Data Science  Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders.

    Episode: 41 - Sonia Timberlake on Agentic AI for Biotech Coders

  8. Mar 31

    Episode: 40 - Allissa Dillman and LaFrancis Gibson on the Power of Hackathons

    Joining Trends from the Trenches is Allissa Dillman, founder and CEO of BioData Sage, and LaFrancis Gibson, manager for health promotion at ORAU, who discuss this year’s Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Hackathon sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE) Training Center. With host Allison Proffitt, they discuss which tools and datasets from CFDE will be part of the Hackathon, who should participate, learning and collaborating beyond datasets and tools, FAIR principles in an ever-developing AI environment, and a message beyond the teams that are participating.   Links from this episode:   Bio-IT World BioTeam Bio-IT World Europe BioData Sage  ORAU  Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders.

    Episode: 40 - Allissa Dillman and LaFrancis Gibson on the Power of Hackathons
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4.9
out of 5
27 Ratings

About

Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders. BioTeam co-founder Stan Gloss brings years of industry experience in science, data, and technology to conversations exploring what is driving data and discovery, and what’s coming next.

Information

  • Creator
    Bio-IT World
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    48
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Trends from the Trenches
  • Show Website
    Trends from the Trenches

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