Trends from the Trenches Bio-IT World

After ten years of working on a specific disease, Chris Gibson’s graduate school lab tested their treatment theory on an animal model. It not only didn’t work, it actually made the animals worse. The experience prompted Gibson to look into how other tools and techniques could be brought to bear on biological programs. And so he quit medical school to co-found Recursion Pharmaceuticals where he is now CEO.  
In this episode, Gibson sits down with host Stan Gloss of BioTeam, about Recursion’s mission to decode biology, radically improve lives, and set big goals to innovate across every stage of drug discovery. “If you set goals that are easily achieved, you default to using tools that have been used in the past. The only way you can force yourself to use new tools is if you set goals that are very hard to achieve if not seemingly impossible,” Gibson said. He talks about the company’s use of ’omics technologies to answer the industry’s present and future questions, their highly automated wet lab with robots, and Recursion’s use of machine learning to understand biology as a complete system. Gibson also discusses the company’s purpose-built datasets and the culture-first approach that helps foster more agility relative to larger, older pharmaceutical giants.

Links from this episode:  
Bio-IT World
BioTeam
Recursion 
Recursion’s Vision for the New Shape of Drug Discovery 
 
  
Trends from the Trenches boiler: 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.

Terry Lo has been in healthcare for almost 25 years, with business and commercial roles across pharma, diagnostics, and life sciences, but his most recent role—CEO at Vizgen—connects him with what he calls, “without a doubt the most exciting space I’ve been involved with.” In this episode, Lo speaks with BioTeam’s Stan Gloss about spatial biology, why it matters, and how he imagines the technology changing healthcare’s future.  
Lo details how a science that explores the intersections between visual histology and molecular markers creates more complete images or maps of healthy and diseased tissues to better understand disease onset and progression. He explains, “The challenge has always been that these two have been very separate fields of science and technology. Now we have this ability to bring them together. And that’s really how you get spatial biology.” He also talks about Vizgen’s MERSCOPE platform powered by MERFISH (multiplexed error robust fluorescence in situ hybridization) technology, its origins at Harvard, and the company’s collaboration with the Allen Brain Institute to create detailed brain maps. 

Links from this episode:  
Bio-IT World
BioTeam
Vizgen
Vizgen Launches Data Release Program, Shares Spatial Genomics Mouse Brain Map
Spatial Surge: AGBT Updates On Single-Cell and Spatial Genomics, In Situ Analysis, More
Allen Institute for Brain Science 
Trends from the Trenches boiler: 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.

Host Stan Gloss, founder of BioTeam, talks with Aaron Friedman, HealthAI Principal Product Manager at Amazon Web Services, about the launch of Amazon Omics. This new purpose-built service helps healthcare and life science organizations store, query, and analyze genomic, transcriptomic, and other omics data to generate insights that improve health and advance scientific discoveries. The platform simplifies and accelerates the process of storing and analyzing data for research and clinical applications. 
On the day of the announcement, Friedman discusses why Amazon Omics will best suit small and large biotech companies and make it easier for various organizations to mine their data. He also outlines its key features, how it combines data with other modalities, and why it lends itself to top-tier multi-omics and multimodal analysis. 

Links from this episode:  
Bio-IT World
BioTeam
Amazon Web Services 
AWS Omics 
Trends from the Trenches boiler: 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.

Host Stan Gloss, founder of BioTeam, invites Mike Tarselli, chief scientific officer at TetraScience, to chat about data and how the life sciences industry thinks about our primary product. They discuss the tech sector’s influence on pharma in switching from a project mindset that yields outputs to a product mindset that yields outcomes and why the industry should use traditional supply chain mechanics as the blueprint to generate and package data. 
Tarselli also advises biotech companies experiencing a data transformation—as opposed to a digital transformation—to start small and resist the urge to make sweeping changes. “If everybody did these little 1% and 5% hacks here and there, you would have a 20x better laboratory in two years. Data transformation initiatives tend to fail when they go too big,” he says. Lastly, Tarselli shares his hopes for a global and highly collaborative environment that fosters data exchange and readiness in the pharmaceutical space.

Links from this episode:  
Bio-IT World
BioTeam
TetraScience
TetraScience Announces GxP Solution, $500M Investment in Scientific Data Cloud
"I, Pencil" Essay by Leonard E. Read 
Trends from the Trenches boiler: 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.

Graphene has quickly become a biotech buzzword as scientists aim to better connect with biology and usher in a new wave of technological advancements. Outperforming silicon at nearly every turn, graphene is one of the most biocompatible tools for extracting valuable information without disrupting biological systems. “Graphene is a single layer of carbon molecules. Everything in our body is made of carbon. It’s the most compatible material we can find that has amazing electronic properties. You can build electronics and conjugate with biology without impacting the biology and without biology impacting it,” says Dr. Kiana Aran, chief scientific officer at Cardea Bio, Keck Graduate Institute associate professor of bioengineering, and founder of the Aran Nebula Foundation.  
In the latest episode of Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast, host Stan Gloss, founder of BioTeam, speaks with Aran about the scientific advantages of merging graphene with modern technology. She also discusses her work in creating graphene-based biological transistors for pathogen detection, CRISPR-based gene editing, and plant genotyping. Finally, Dr. Aran provides an update on the Aran Nebula Foundation, an organization designed to help women in science build their scientific skill sets in preparation for leadership roles. 
Trends from the Trenches boiler: 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.

In the latest episode of Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast, host Stan Gloss, founder of BioTeam, talks with Fernanda Foertter, director of developer relations at Voltron Data, about her AI experiences in the past few years, whether we’ve made any real progress, and if she thinks AI is a pipe dream. “It feels like it’s a pipe dream to be able to get these things right [today]... I think as we get the ability to regularize and get data in a way that looks as harmonized as possible, things will improve. But the problem is getting to that point.”  
Foertter also shares her thoughts about imputation, why most companies should stop buying AI startups and hire a statistician, and why sharing data is one of the most critical components of industry progress. “What’s going to change the world is when we start learning how to share data with one another. The differentiator is going to be how you do the service, and not necessarily the data that you hold. People who understand that and see that will actually benefit far more than people who are thinking that their data is gold, and they have a lot more than the next person.”   

Links from this episode:  
2021 Trends from the Trenches Presentation
Bio-IT World
BioTeam 
Voltron Data 
   
Trends from the Trenches boiler: 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.