E197 Victor Hanson-Smith, Head of Computational Biology at Verge Genomics

Today's guest is Victor Hanson-Smith, Head of Computational Biology at Verge Genomics in San Francisco. Founded in 2015, Verge Genomics is a next-generation biopharmaceutical start-up using systems biology to accelerate the development of life-saving treatments for neurodegenerative diseases. Verge's approach offers a breakthrough opportunity to identify drugs that dramatically improve patient outcomes and fundamentally lower the cost curve of pharmaceutical development.

Victor leads a world-class team to discover new drugs for neurodegenerative diseases. His team develops algorithms and software that integrates multiple types of genomic, transcriptomic and phenotypic data in order to reveal molecular mechanisms that cause disease pathology. They computationally predict small molecules and gene perturbations that can therapeutically reverse these mechanisms and test their predictions in living models, including human cell cultures and rodent models.

In the episode, Victor will tell you about:

What makes a good Computational Biologist,

What attracted him to the field,

The interesting work they do at Verge Genomics,

How they are applying AI within the business,

Overcoming challenges within AI ethics &

Exciting opportunities and plans for growth within the team