Raising Health AI at the Intersection of Bio with Vijay Pande, Surya Ganguli, and Bowen Liu
Aug 13, 2024
Vijay Pande, a general partner at a16z Bio + Health, is joined by venture partner Surya Ganguli and investing partner Bowen Liu. They dive into how AI is revolutionizing drug development, highlighting its role in identifying new targets and optimizing clinical trials. Discussions touch on the power of large datasets in advancing personalized medicine, as well as the exciting potential of using AI to merge various biological data types. Their perspectives present a captivating look at the future of health technology and research.
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Vijay's AI Aha Moment
- Vijay Pande described his "aha moment" with ChatGPT's surprising capabilities and the ESM fold model for proteins.
- These breakthroughs showed impressive transfer of language model techniques to biology, especially protein structure understanding.
Surya's Early Drug Design Win
- Surya Ganguli shared his grad school experience where computational predictions of drug repurposing were experimentally validated.
- This real-world success convinced him of computational drug design's potential early on.
Evolution of AI in Drug Design
- AI in drug design evolved from physics-based and expert-rule methods to machine learning which learns from data.
- Deep learning further revolutionized the field by learning representations directly from raw data without hand-designed features.