Trends from the Trenches

Bryn Roberts has spent thirty years in informatics and data, most recently at Roche and before that at AstraZeneca. Now as Global Head of Data and Analytics at Roche Information Solutions, Roberts applies his career-long learnings to the current era of data in life sciences, offering advice for building data citizenship, creating a FAIR data culture, and avoiding vendor lock-in.   Links from this...

At Pfizer, AI plays a key role in every step of the drug discovery process, Anastasia Christianson, Global Head of AI, ML, Analytics, and Data at Pfizer, tells Stan Gloss on the latest episode of the Trends from the Trenches podcast. Christianson lists the areas at Pfizer where AI is in play and for which she has AI/ML responsibility: research and discovery, clinical development, manufacturing sup...

Kjiersten Fagnan is an applied mathematician enamored of biology’s messy datasets. Now, as chief informatics officer at the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (JGI), located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, she finds bioinformatics' computational and data challenges very different from applied math or partial differential equations. Fagnan is the newest guest on the Trends f...

The steel industry is not a common birthplace of biotech companies, but Andrew Hopkins traces the ideas that became Exscientia back to his time there. New technologies and new processes replaced nearly 90% of the steel workforce, and Hopkins kept those market lessons. He says, “When I ended up in pharma and biotech, I had a very different perception of the power of commerce and markets and what th...

After ten years of working on a specific disease, Chris Gibson’s graduate school lab tested their treatment theory on an animal model. It not only didn’t work, it actually made the animals worse. The experience prompted Gibson to look into how other tools and techniques could be brought to bear on biological programs. And so he quit medical school to co-found Recursion Pharmaceuticals where he is...

Terry Lo has been in healthcare for almost 25 years, with business and commercial roles across pharma, diagnostics, and life sciences, but his most recent role—CEO at Vizgen—connects him with what he calls, “without a doubt the most exciting space I’ve been involved with.” In this episode, Lo speaks with BioTeam’s Stan Gloss about spatial biology, why it matters, and how he imagines the technology...

Host Stan Gloss, founder of BioTeam, talks with Aaron Friedman, HealthAI Principal Product Manager at Amazon Web Services, about the launch of Amazon Omics. This new purpose-built service helps healthcare and life science organizations store, query, and analyze genomic, transcriptomic, and other omics data to generate insights that improve health and advance scientific discoveries. The platform si...

Host Stan Gloss, founder of BioTeam, invites Mike Tarselli, chief scientific officer at TetraScience, to chat about data and how the life sciences industry thinks about our primary product. They discuss the tech sector’s influence on pharma in switching from a project mindset that yields outputs to a product mindset that yields outcomes and why the industry should use traditional supply chain mech...

Graphene has quickly become a biotech buzzword as scientists aim to better connect with biology and usher in a new wave of technological advancements. Outperforming silicon at nearly every turn, graphene is one of the most biocompatible tools for extracting valuable information without disrupting biological systems. “Graphene is a single layer of carbon molecules. Everything in our body is made of...

In the latest episode of Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast, host Stan Gloss, founder of BioTeam, talks with Fernanda Foertter, director of developer relations at Voltron Data, about her AI experiences in the past few years, whether we’ve made any real progress, and if she thinks AI is a pipe dream. “It feels like it’s a pipe dream to be able to get these things right [today]... I thi...

Victoria Gamerman’s love of analytics and math came from her grandmother—the first mathematician she knew. And in her nearly decade at Boehringer Ingelheim, she’s been putting that love to use as the Global Head of Data Governance and Insights.  In the latest episode of Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast, host Stan Gloss, founder of BioTeam, talks with Gamerman about real world data,...

Neurodiversity is inconvenient in a classroom; George Church knows firsthand. But in the latest episode of Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast, Church tells host, Stan Gloss: “I’m interested in overcoming the inconvenience of having people who are a little bit out on the bell curve… You don’t want necessarily to train everybody in your lab to be as close to the ideal citizen as possibl...

Susan Gregurick, Associate Director for Data Science and Director of the Office of Data Science Strategy at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), speaks with Stan Gloss, podcast host and BioTeam founder, about the next iteration of the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science and the lessons learned from the recent pandemic. “COVID just told us how much we weren’t doing, and how challenging it is to...

Dr. Kim Branson’s intense interest in drug discovery and structural biology quickly led to an interest in machine learning. After receiving multiple degrees from esteemed universities in Australia, Branson trained at Stanford and now works as the Senior Vice President and Global Head of AI/ML at GSK. With host, Stan Gloss, Branson shares his work in creating “biological twins.” These 3-D tumor cul...

James Cuff summarizes his career over the past 25 years or so in the latest episode of Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast. He tells our host, BioTeam’s Stan Gloss, where he’s seen updates in the space and which things have fundamentally stayed the same. He also shares about the problem that’s been bugging him for the past five years and the new company he’s joined that could fix it. ...

Jim Bilotta found his home in orphan diseases early in his career, driven by both personal experience and the “unbelievable” impact on patients and their families. Today, as Chief Information Officer, head of IT, at Alnylam, he is still pursuing that impact. Bilotta and Trends from the Trenches host, Stan Gloss, discuss digital transformation at Alnylam, and how Bilotta views the distinction betwe...

Bio-IT World and BioTeam have been exploring the drivers of life sciences innovation for years during the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo and in regular columns in the publication. Now Bio-IT World editor, Allison Proffitt, and BioTeam co-founder, Stan Gloss, discuss their latest project: a podcast to capture in-depth conversations with leaders in the field about data, culture, technology, and...

At the National Cancer Institute, Tony Kerlavage knows quite a bit about managing very large pools of data. When NCI launched the Genomic Data Commons, it aimed to democratize access to the genomic data in The Cancer Genome Atlas and other sources. Since then, though, Kerlavage points out that our data types and volumes have only grown. Now NCI is taking a “Commons of Commons” approach to link poo...

From big pharma to Amazon Web Services, Lita Sands has seen the amazing impact that the Cloud has had on life sciences research over the course of her career. During the pandemic, Sands has seen companies’ journeys to the cloud accelerate from 8-12 year roadmaps into 1-2 year transition plans. As companies turn their attention to enabling digital transformation, Sands has some advice. Take a 1-3 y...