Decoding Bio

Decoding Bio’s AI x Bio Summit 2024 is a wrap! 300 attendees, 3 panels, 1 fireside chat, 13 roundtables later, we couldn’t be more energized about what is coming in the new generation of life science companies. The Summit's mission is to foster meaningful conversations within the ecosystem, moving beyond the polarized debates. The field is marred with easy, extreme positions: “AI companies don’t understand biology” or “AI is a paradigm shift and is revolutionizing drug discovery”. The truth is that whilst these are extreme examples, they’re not bold or contrarian opinions; they’re the easy way out of a real conversation. It is clear that the answer is nuanced, and the Summit’s speakers and attendees demonstrated this. Our hope is that, in the future, an AI x Bio Summit will no longer be necessary: that pharma executives, industry scientists, academia, startup founders and execs, late-stage and public equity investors and the venture ecosystem can seamlessly discuss how AI can better serve patients and the planet. To paraphrase Amit Etkin from Alto Neuroscience: "Hopefully, in the future, we won't need AI conferences, but simply conferences where we discuss patient outcomes." The AI in Pharma panel with Greg Meyers (Bristol Myers Squibb), Cynthia Hong, (Novartis), Shameer Khader, (Sanofi) and Guang Yang, (McKinsey & Company) showcased how AI has permeated various departments due to its real utility. It demonstrated that pharmaceutical companies are not the innovation-averse incumbents as often perceived and have a defined vision for what they want to build, buy, or partner with. The Foundation Models in Biology panel with Tom Sercu (EvolutionaryScale), Philipp Lorenz (Basecamp Research), Matej Macak (QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey), Ali Madani (Profluent) and Renee Y. (NVIDIA) discussed how new models are enabling us to design, rather than discover new biology. The Building a Biotech in 2024 panel with Sajith Wickramasekara (Benchling), Michael Nally (Generate:Biomedicines) and Bigyan Bista (Enveda Biosciences) showed us that it is critical to their businesses, but it won't replace wet lab experimentation anytime soon. I wanted to thank the incredible co-hosts Amee Kapadia (Cantos) and Eric J. Dimise, & Johanna (Rodriguez) Grossman, (NYSE), our sponsors who made it possible (Amazon Web Services (AWS), Bunsen, HSBC, McKinsey & Company and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP), all the speakers and roundtable leads who generously offered their time and wisdom, as well as all the attendees that came for the day. Until next year!

This week we cover the history of Regeneron in 350 words. A memorable quote from its founder Leonard Schleifer on how they raised their first $1M: “I got to meet George and he struck me as a guy who actually did want to build something, who respected science, who really would let us run, who respected the fact that we had really smart people we were trying to bring around. And wasn't trying to be like a super ego venture capitalist like you find today, who think they know more about the science than anybody else, and they're going to decide what you work on. They're going to tell you how to do it. He wasn't that type of a guy. He was a very, very creative, helpful on the business side, super helpful and helping me understand some of these things. And he and I finally went to a Chinese restaurant and we literally scratched out a deal on the terms that he'd give me a million dollars on the back of a napkin” See the full post in Decoding Bio's BioByte below

𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐞: BiotechTV will be broadcasting from the AI x Bio Summit at NYSE on Thursday, July 25th. Tune in to hear from top companies and investors in the space.

Less than two weeks to go until Decoding Bio’s AI x Bio Summit 2024 at the NYSE Amee and I are thrilled to host a distinguished set of speakers: Ali Madani (Profluent), Amit Etkin (Alto Neuroscience), Bigyan Bista (Enveda Biosciences), Cynthia Hong (Novartis), Greg Meyers (Bristol Myers Squibb), Guang Yang, (McKinsey & Company), Matej Macak (QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey), Michael Nally (Generate:Biomedicines), Nabiha Saklayen (Cellino), Philipp Lorenz (Basecamp Research), Renee Y. (NVIDIA), Sajith Wickramasekara (Benchling), Tom Sercu (EvolutionaryScale) & Ziv Bar-Joseph (Sanofi) The event is generously sponsored by McKinsey & Company, HSBC, Orrick Tech & Amazon Web Services (AWS) in collaboration with NYSE (Johanna and Eric) and Bunsen. The conference is now full, but if you’d like to attend the evening reception, please register your interest by joining the waitlist here: https://lu.ma/f8akt3fh

This past week in bio! > AI-Driven Behavior Change Could Transform Health Care Sam Altman Arianna Huffington > Flagship’s Noubar Afeyan on uncertainty, AI and biotech’s future Kyle LaHucik > Could billions of dollars in AI funding lead to the same number of new drugs? Ashu Singhal Sajith Wickramasekara > The strategy behind one of the most successful labs in the world Luka Gebel Chander Velu Toni Vidal-Puig MD PhD FRCP FMedSci MBA > The Neurolipid Atlas: a lipidomics resource for neurodegenerative diseases uncovers cholesterol as a regulator of astrocyte reactivity impaired by ApoE4 Femke Feringa et al. > Emergence of large-scale cell death through ferroptotic trigger waves Hannah K. C. Co Chia-Chou Wu Sheng-hong Chen Read BioByte 083 here: https://lnkd.in/g7CCNw_A

Here are some highlights of the most interesting GenAI content from our Snapshot. GenAI is of growing importance to the biotech industry, particularly as its capabilities have accelerated in the over the last 12 months. We covered: · A collaboration between Iambic, Caltech, and NVIDIA that produced NeuralPlexer2, a model that predicts protein/ligand interactions given the protein sequence and the molecular graph of the ligand · Advances in predicting PK and PD, which are difficult to model due to the significant cost of generating training data; groups at Astrazeneca and GSK have published some promising initial results in this pursuit · Insilico’s idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis program, which has relied heavily on advancements in AI to produce a DC that has now successfully made it through phase 1 clinical trials · A lab at UC Berkeley that shed light on the biases protein database composition can impart on model performance, emphasizing the need to be critical of the data used to build these models Read the full Decoding Bio 2024 Snapshot here: https://lnkd.in/gSyY8Bjz

This week in bio: > A Molecular Biologist’s Advice for Life Bruce Booth > B Cells as Drug Factories Cormac Sheridan > Bridge RNAs direct programmable recombination of target and donor DNA Matthew Durrant et al. > A high-density microfluidic bioreactor for the automated manufacturing of CAR T cells Wei-Xiang Sin et al. > Brainwide silencing of prion protein by AAV-mediated delivery of an engineered compact epigenetic editor Edwin Neumann et al. > Patient derived mini-colons enable long-term modeling of tumor-microenvironment complexity Luis Francisco Lorenzo Martín et al. > A Review of Large Language Models and Autonomous Agents in Chemistry Mayk Caldas et al. Read BioByte 082 here: https://lnkd.in/grZsB-Kg

This week in bio: > A Molecular Biologist’s Advice for Life Bruce Booth > B Cells as Drug Factories Cormac Sheridan > Bridge RNAs direct programmable recombination of target and donor DNA Matthew Durrant et al. > A high-density microfluidic bioreactor for the automated manufacturing of CAR T cells Wei-Xiang Sin et al. > Brainwide silencing of prion protein by AAV-mediated delivery of an engineered compact epigenetic editor Edwin Neumann et al. > Patient derived mini-colons enable long-term modeling of tumor-microenvironment complexity Luis Francisco Lorenzo Martín et al. > A Review of Large Language Models and Autonomous Agents in Chemistry Mayk Caldas et al. Read BioByte 082 here: https://lnkd.in/grZsB-Kg

This week in bio! > Evolution of the Biotech IPO Markets from Busted to Booming Bruce Booth > Engineering viral vectors for acoustically targeted gene delivery Richard Hongyi Li Manwal Harb John Heath James Trippett Mikhail Shapiro Jerzy Szablowski > China has become a scientific superpower > Gene editing flows to the lungs Mattijs Bulcaen Marianne Carlon > Bioengineered human colon organdies with in vivo-like cellular complexity and function Olga Mitrofanova Mike Nikolaev Quan Xu Nicolas Broguiere Irineja Ćubela Gray Camp Michael Bscheider Matthias Lutolf > Enhancing Pediatric Access to Cell and Gene Therapies Crystal Mackall Catherine Bollard Nancy Goodman Casey Carr Rayne Rouce Elena Sotillo Rich Stoner Fyodor Urnov Alan S. Wayne Julie R. Park Donald B. Kohn Read BioByte 080 here: https://lnkd.in/g8JknGck

This week in bio: > A big step forward for brain delivery of genes therapies Eric Vallabh Minikel > A single infusion of engineered long-lived and multifunctional T cells confers durable remission of asthma in mice  > RNA delivery heats up cold tumors > An Opinionated AlphaFold3 Field Guide Simon Barnett > Tx-LLM: A Large Language Model for Therapeutics Juan Manuel Zambrano Chaves Eric Wang Tao Tu Eeshit Dhaval Vaishnav Byron Lee S. Sara Mahdavi Christopher Semturs David Fleet Vivek Natarajan Shekoofeh Azizi > Folding the human proteome using BioNeMo: A fused dataset of structural models for machine learning purposes Michael Christian Hetmann Lena Parigger Hassan Sirelkhatim Abe Stern Andreas Krassnigg Karl Gruber Georg Steinkellner David Ruau Christian C. Gruber https://lnkd.in/gr2HhVy9