Creating new and better medicines, featuring Virginia Burger of New Equilibrium Biosciences

In one sentence...

Computational biology is enhancing our understanding of intrinsically disordered proteins, leading to exciting new medical treatments.

Overview

From videogames to protein discovery, high performance computing impacts how we understand and engage with each other and the world around us. Virginia Burger, CEO and Co-Founder of New Equilibrium Biosciences, epitomizes the value of interdisciplinary skills applied to a hunch that biology and computer modeling can lead to new medical discoveries. 

“[New Equilibrium is] taking a problem that a lot of people have looked at before and looking at it from a completely new lens,” observes Malvika V. Miller, our biotech contributor. With their own in-house datasets and simulation capabilities purpose built for drug discovery, Dr. Burger and her team have been pushing the boundaries of generative artificial intelligence well ahead of the popular recognition of the phrase. 

Show Notes

• Episode page, transcript, and podcast listening links: https://toughtechtoday.com/creating-new-medicines/
• Virginia Burger on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/virginiaburger 
• New Equilibrium Biosciences (company): https://newequilibriumbio.com
• Watch this show on Youtube: https://youtu.be/PUa9f8UORvc 

Credit Roll

• Producers: Jonathan "JMill" Miller and Forrest
• Guest: Virginia Burger
• Hosts: JMill and Forrest Meyen
• Contributing Expert: Malvika V. Miller
• Editing: Giro Studio and JMill
• Transcript: Alan Yan and JMill
• Blog Author: JMill
• Art Design: JMill

Topic Timecodes

[2:02] What is New Equilibrium working on and what are intrinsically disordered proteins

[3:17] Pervasiveness of IDPs

[4:21] What does "intrinsically disordered" mean?

[6:12] Commercializing the science

[7:51] History of IDPs

[9:26] Virginia’s co-founder and his book

[13:10] Simulating IDPs & the computational wave

[19:57] Quantum computing applications & algorithm design
[21:16] Training data for AI models

[22:55] Partnerships

[24:41] Recent funding round & hiring

[26:46] How to stay on top of the field

[31:35] Virginia’s path

[36:57] State of the field of protein folding

[39:24] Biggest challenge for IDPs

[40:08] The leap into starting a company

[43:47] Being incubated at Petri Bio

[46:19] Virginia’s advice re: startups

[49:24] Virginia’s pitch to potential employees

[50:45] What Virginia’s reading