Shows
Data in BiotechHow Twist Bioscience Synthesizes 32 Million DNA Sequences a Day for AI Drug DiscoveryAI can design a molecule in seconds, however someone still has to build it and test it before it means anything.
You're pouring resources into AI-driven molecule design, but nobody on your team has answered the harder question: can you actually make what the model just designed?
Patrick Finn is President and Chief Operating Officer of Twist Bioscience, a company writing DNA on silicon chips at a scale of roughly 32 million distinct oligonucleotides a day. Under his leadership, Twist has become the manufacturing layer behind antibody discovery, liquid biopsy, and molecular residual disease testing programs...
2026-10-1446 minData in BiotechHow Standardized Cell Labeling Could Fix Biotech's Data ProblemFlow cytometry can find a cell population in seconds, but naming it consistently across labs is a problem still unsolved.
If you've ever tried to compare cytometry data across studies, CROs, or even two scientists in the same lab, you know the frustration: everyone gates their own way, and the same cell population ends up with three different definitions. That inconsistency is quietly limiting what AI can do with biotech data.
Ryan Brinkman is VP Research Director of Flow Cytometry Bioinformatics at Dotmatics and Founding Director of SOULCAP, the Standard Ontology for Unambiguous Labeling in...
2026-09-301h 13Data in BiotechDrugBank CEO: Why Your AI Model Is Only Giving You Half the AnswerAsk a general AI model how many approved drugs hit a target, and it might tell you three when the real answer is six, sounding just as confident either way.
If your team is grounding drug discovery decisions in AI output with no way to trace where the answer came from, you're one regulator's question away from a very expensive problem.
Lisa Downey is CEO of DrugBank, a structured biomedical intelligence platform cited in more than 60,000 papers and used by nine of the top 20 global pharma companies. She previously built Clarivate's genomic and rare disease...
2026-09-1752 minData in BiotechHow to Identify the Blind Spots in Your Biotech's Genomic Data Before They Cost You a Drug TargetMost drug discovery genomic data comes from a thin slice of the world, and that bias follows every decision downstream.
Your team can run a Mendelian randomization study on 35,000 patients and still walk away with a single signal that doesn't even apply to the population you care about. If your phenotype definitions are fuzzy, more data won't save you.
Erika Kvikstad is a computational biologist who led precision medicine for cardiovascular disease at Bristol-Myers Squibb, working on therapies including Camzyos for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. She now works independently on genomic data equity, focused on how reference...
2026-09-021h 10Data in BiotechHow to Turn Single-Cell Data Into a New Class of Cell-Depleting TherapiesWhy treating the cell, not the protein, could turn chronic disease treatment into something closer to a cure.
You've built single-cell pipelines that spit out clusters, p-values and target lists, but nothing that survives contact with the clinic. What if the clustering method itself is quietly leading you astray?
Adam Freund is Founder and CEO of Arda Therapeutics, a biotech using single-cell sequencing to find the pathogenic cells driving chronic disease. He spent seven years as a Principal Investigator at Calico Life Sciences, building a research lab on the biology of ageing and helping grow...
2026-08-1954 minData in BiotechWhy Biotech Talks About AI But Won't Pay for the Data It NeedsEveryone in biotech agrees AI needs more data. Almost no one is willing to pay for it.
If you're trying to build or buy a biotech AI model, you've hit the same wall: predictive performance depends on data your budget doesn't cover, and nobody in the field seems willing to close that gap.
John Androsavich runs Ginkgo Datapoints, the bio AI data arm of Ginkgo Bioworks. He trained as an RNA scientist, spent years on the pharma side deciding which technologies were worth buying, and now sells the raw biological data everyone claims to want.
2026-08-051h 02Data in BiotechBeyond Language: Why Drug Discovery Needs Physical AI, Not Just Large Language ModelsIn this episode of Data in Biotech, host Ross Katz sits down with Woody Sherman, Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at PsiThera, for a conversation on why AI can transform drug discovery's paperwork and code while barely touching the hardest part of the problem: the molecules themselves. Woody's career runs through physical chemistry at MIT; over a decade at Schrödinger building tools the industry still relies on; founding Silicon Therapeutics (where his team took a small molecule STING agonist from concept to clinic in roughly three years); scaling that platform after Roivant's acquisition; and now leading PsiThera's effort t...
2026-07-2058 minData in BiotechSynthesizable by Design: Rethinking AI's Role in Small Molecule Drug DiscoveryIn this episode of Data in Biotech, host Ross Katz sits down with Paul Finn, Chief Scientific Officer at Oxford Drug Design, for a conversation on what it actually takes to find a drug molecule that works not just on paper but also in the lab, in the cell, and, ultimately, in the clinic. Paul brings four decades of experience across what became GSK, Pfizer, and a series of Oxford-area spinouts and has shepherded a compound all the way to a marketed drug. That perspective gives him a particular kind of skepticism toward AI results that look too good...
2026-06-1759 minData in BiotechFrom Tissue to Mechanism to Decision: Building AI for Computational OncologyIn this episode of Data in Biotech, host Ross Katz sits down with Arvind Rao, Professor of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan, for a discussion on the gap between what biomedical AI can do and what it can reliably be trusted to do in clinical practice. Arvind's research sits at the intersection of computational oncology and AI governance and his lab works across H&E histopathology, multiplex immunofluorescence, spatial transcriptomics, and single-cell RNA sequencing, not just to build predictive models, but to understand the full lifecycle from data to model to inference, and to ask...
2026-06-0246 minData in BiotechCavities in the Data: Building FDA-Cleared AI for Dental Imaging with OverjetIn this episode of Data in Biotech, host Ross Katz sits down with Sadegh Salehi, Director of Research and Principal Scientist at Overjet, to explore what rigorous model evaluation actually looks like when the stakes are clinical.
Overjet builds FDA-cleared vision models that detect and quantify dental disease across billions of X-ray images from thousands of practices - a data problem with a staggering number of dimensions. Thirty-two teeth per adult patient, each with different morphology. Multiple image types capturing different anatomy. Fifteen to twenty sensor manufacturers producing perceptually distinct images, each with different contrast, resolution, and n...
2026-05-1358 minData in BiotechData as a Moat: Why Biotech's Most Valuable Asset is Buried in a Hard DriveIn this episode of Data in Biotech, host Ross Katz sits down with Jesse Johnson, founder of Merelogic, a software consulting firm specializing in data infrastructure for biotech organizations.
Jesse brings a rare perspective to the conversation: having built data systems at Google where engineers control the data collection function end to end, before moving into biotech, where the biology does what it wants and bench scientists, not engineers, generate the data.
The result is a grounded, pragmatic take on one of the most consequential and underappreciated questions in life sciences right now: as bio fo...
2026-04-3042 minData in BiotechHow Phage Therapy is Scaling to Meet Antibiotic Resistance with Jessica SacherPhage therapy is stepping into the spotlight as antibiotic resistance rises - and Jessica Sacher is helping lead the charge. In this episode, Ross Katz speaks with Jessica, Co-Founder of Phage Directory and Staff Scientist at Stanford, about sourcing phages, operationalizing therapy, and predicting efficacy through data. This conversation explores how personalized phage therapy works, its scalability, and the data challenges shaping its future.
What You'll Learn in This Episode:
Why phage therapy is a promising solution to antibiotic-resistant infectionsHow Phage Directory connects researchers and clinicians to accelerate treatmentWhat operational hurdles exist in scaling pers...
2025-04-3059 minData in BiotechTargeting Transcription Factors with AI, featuring Will Fondrie from Talus BioHow do you drug the undruggable? In this episode of Data in Biotech, Ross Katz sits down with Will Fondrie, Head of Data Science and Engineering at Talus Bio, to explore how machine learning, mass spectrometry, and innovative computational models are transforming drug discovery. Learn how Talus Bio is targeting transcription factors—once considered out of reach—with scalable, high-impact data science.
What You'll Learn in This Episode
Why transcription factors are historically hard to drug and how Talus Bio is changing thatHow mass spectrometry offers high-throughput, unbiased views of protein-DNA interactionsThe role of reco...
2025-04-1646 minData in BiotechHow AI Can Increase Clinical Trial Efficiency with Patrick Leung from Faro HealthHow can AI improve clinical trials and accelerate drug development?
In this episode of Data in Biotech, Ross Katz sits down with Patrick Leung, CTO of Faro Health, to explore how AI-driven tools are reshaping clinical trial design. Patrick shares insights into document generation, patient burden analysis, and AI governance in biotech.
Learn how Faro Health is developing clinical protocols and leveraging AI to optimize trial success while ensuring regulatory compliance. Whether you're in biotech or healthcare, this conversation offers valuable takeaways on the future of AI in increasing clinical trial efficiency.
What You...
2025-03-1939 min