Beyond Biotech podcast 51

1:13  Labiotech news
3:09  Lund Spring Symposium
27:36 Sapient

Sapient

Sapient is an end-to-end biomarker discovery organization dedicated to accelerating the mapping of circulating chemistries in humans through rapid, large-scale small molecule biomarker profiling. 

Its platform combines next-generation mass spectrometry technologies capable of assaying tens of thousands of small molecule biomarkers in human biosamples, advanced biocomputational learning, and a proprietary Human Biology Database with extensive data from several hundred thousand biosamples. 

Together these approaches enable rapid discovery and validation of circulating biomarkers of health, disease, and drug responsiveness at unprecedented speed and scale.

We spoke with founder and CEO of Sapient, Mo Jain. 

Lund Spring Symposium

The inaugural Lund Spring Symposium held in Lund, Sweden from May 24 to 26. It was an impressive forum where an exceptional set of international and national top researchers, entrepreneurs, and business leaders gathered around the subject of ‘Enabling Novel Therapeutic Principles,’ with examples of actual treatment breakthroughs, as well as novel modalities across therapeutic areas ranging from cancer, COVID-19 to neuroscience.

Six researchers were awarded for their groundbreaking discoveries and outstanding achievements: Craig Crews Yale University; Brian Kobilka, Stanford University; Robert Langer, MIT; Jude Samulski, University of North Carolina; Sarah Tabrizi, University College London; and Drew Weissman, University of Pennsylvania.

The symposium also featured two other Nobel Prize laureates, David Julius, from the University of California San Francisco, who gave a presentation, and Bengt Samuelsson, after whom one of the awards was named.

The organizer, Lars Grundemar, Lund University and AGB Pharma, decided together with Mikael Dolsten, Lund University, and chief scientific officer, president R&D, Pfizer, and Claes Wahlestedt, Lund University and University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, to create the event featuring high-profile international and local researchers at a symposium in Lund to raise the profile of pharmacology as a cross-functional discipline in the 21st century, and to provide a forum to facilitate collaborations across academia and industry.

“This event was designed to reflect the importance of combining basic research with clinical applications and entrepreneurship in successful development of novel therapeutic principles,” Grundemar said. 

The symposium was intended for scientists and entrepreneurs to be an engaging and interactive forum to broaden the participants’ horizons of cutting-edge science.

The Lund Spring Symposium will be held biannually, with the next event taking place in 2025.