Trends from the Trenches

In this month’s episode of Trends from the Trenches, host Stan Gloss speaks with Joseph La Barge. La Barge trained as an attorney but has spent most of his career building biotech businesses and securing funding. He shepherded Spark Therapeutics through its acquisition by Roche and has since joined Apertura Gene Therapy as CEO. He and Stan talk about the entrepreneurship journey, gene expression and capsid engineering, and Apertura...

Change can be scary, but it can also bring new opportunities and lead to growth and innovation. In this episode of Trends from the Trenches, host Stan Gloss from BioTeam and Adama Ibrahim, VP of Digital Strategy & Change Management at Novo Nordisk, delve into a conversation about humanity’s natural resistance to change, why it is important to overcome that resistance, and how change is the key to making progress. Ibrahim also s...

It’s no secret that the industry is drowning in data. That’s why data management strategies are needed now more than ever to speed up discoveries and bring new solutions to the market. In this episode of Trends from the Trenches, host Stan Gloss discusses data management strategies with Becky Upton, Ph. D., President of Pistoia Alliance. Dr. Upton shares how her organization is maximizing data management efficiency, such as deliver...

Going from one field to the next can be a tricky thing to navigate. In this episode of Trends from the Trenches, host Stan Gloss speaks with Tom Miller, Co-Founder and CEO of Iambic Therapeutics, about his journey from academia as a professor at the California Institute of Technology to getting B-Round funding as the CEO of his own start-up. Miller discusses why he started his company, what inspired him to turn his research into an...

In this episode of Trends from the Trenches, host Stan Gloss speaks with Heidi Rehm, PhD, Chair Elect of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH), about data sharing policies and standards that can advance both genomics and health. Rehm discusses the benefits of data sharing on a global scale, how organizations can reduce friction of people’s usage and adoption of standards, and successful examples of implementation. She...

In the latest episode of the Trends from the Trenches podcast, host Stan Gloss and Bryn Roberts, PhD, Global Head of Data & Analytics at Roche Information Solutions explore the Why and the How behind AI. What used to be “happily left a bit in the background” is now main stage thanks to everyone’s new interest in ChatGPT. Roberts recommends applying pharma’s Target Product Profiles (TPPs) to AI products as well: understanding wh...

After the “magical moment of hope” when the first human genome was sequenced, Jeanne Kehren switched from veterinary medicine to the pharmaceutical industry. Today, she is the SVP of Digital & Commercial Innovation and CIO at Bayer Pharmaceuticals and works in various areas, including sustainability, digital health, and digital transformation. In this episode of Trends from the Trenches, host Stan Gloss speaks with Kehren about...

A few years ago, artificial intelligence was in its developmental stages. Today, it is widely used by various industries and several companies are exploring new ways to utilize its tremendous potential. In this episode of Trends from the Trenches, Stan Gloss speaks with Jarrod Anderson, Senior Director of Artificial Intelligence at ADM, who discusses prioritizing projects, selecting the best team members, and overcoming the biggest...

In this episode of Trends from the Trenches, Stan Gloss speaks with Efosa Ojomo, director of the Global Prosperity Group at the Clayton Christensen Institute (CCI) and coauthor of The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty, about the parallels between consumption economy and life sciences research. Ojomo discusses how relying on data metrics does not necessarily provide full insight on what a consumer au...

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 episode:  
Bryn Robert...

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 supply chain, commercial, medical affa...

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 from the Trenches podcast, speaking ...

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 they can potentially drive, and the p...

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 now CEO.  

In this episode, Gibson s...

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 changing healthcare’s future.  

Lo ...

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 simplifies and accelerates the proces...

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 mechanics as the blueprint to generate ...

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 carbon. It’s the most compatible m...

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 think as we get the ability to regular...