Hav­ing been in­volved in a num­ber of at­tri­tion task force ef­forts dur­ing his tenure as Eu­ro­pean R&D chief at Pfiz­er, David Rob­lin tells me there’s a quote that res­onates with him, ut­tered 20 years ago by South African bi­ol­o­gist Syd­ney Bren­ner when he ac­cept­ed a No­bel Prize.

“We are drown­ing in a sea of da­ta but thirsty for knowl­edge,” is how Rob­lin re­mem­bers it.

But the way those da­ta have been used to date — by drug dis­cov­ery sci­en­tists try­ing to val­i­date their ideas — hasn’t re­al­ly im­proved the rate at which pre­clin­i­cal com­pounds be­come mar­ket­ed drugs, he reck­ons. The po­ten­tial he sees for ma­chine learn­ing and new tech­nolo­gies like sin­gle-cell tran­scrip­tomics to change that is the rea­son why, af­ter eight years as chief of sci­en­tif­ic trans­la­tion at Lon­don’s Fran­cis Crick In­sti­tute, he’s mov­ing down the road to Re­la­tion Ther­a­peu­tics, which has just closed a $25 mil­lion seed round.

“We’re not go­ing to sit here and tell you that ma­chine learn­ing is the sin­gle an­swer and every­thing will be de­signed in the ma­chine and that ma­chine will send a file to the FDA,” he said. “The key ques­tion for a com­pa­ny like ours is, where do you best de­ploy ma­chine learn­ing that af­fords max­i­mum im­pact? Where do you use tran­scrip­tomics? And where do you see the link­age?”

Rob­lin, the CEO, is joined in the C-suite by Lind­say Ed­wards, CTO and pres­i­dent of plat­form. The for­mer head of AI for res­pi­ra­to­ry and im­munol­o­gy at As­traZeneca, Ed­wards al­so led one of GSK’s first da­ta sci­ence groups be­fore that.

Com­ing out of stealth at a time the idea of de­ploy­ing AI/ML in drug R&D has al­ready gone through a cou­ple cy­cles of hype and bust, Re­la­tion’s ap­proach will be ground­ed in ac­tive learn­ing, where ma­chine learn­ing sys­tems will go through the da­ta gen­er­at­ed in its wet and in sil­i­co labs, and then tell the sci­en­tists what new ex­per­i­ments to run for it to come up with new in­sight.

Specif­i­cal­ly, Ed­wards not­ed, the com­pa­ny will be us­ing a frame­work called ac­tive-graph ma­chine learn­ing, or Meta­graph, us­ing the con­cept of graphs as a back­bone so as to map out the com­plex re­la­tion­ships be­tween genes, pro­teins and drugs.

“What Lind­say is do­ing, large­ly, is tak­ing al­go­rithms, ideas that have been de­ployed else­where, par­tic­u­lar­ly in con­sumer so­cial net­work­ing, and turn­ing them to the pur­pose of gene vari­ant bi­ol­o­gy, iden­ti­fi­ca­tion,” Rob­lin said, adding, “So in that sense, I’m quite hap­py to say like, a lot of that stuff is not ab­solute­ly break­through. What we’re go­ing to be do­ing is cre­at­ing a plat­form of in­te­gra­tion which is sec­ond to none, es­sen­tial­ly.”

Based in the Knowl­edge Quar­ter in Lon­don — sur­round­ed by UCL, King’s and Fran­cis Crick as well as sev­er­al hos­pi­tals — Re­la­tion is look­ing to crunch ge­nom­ic da­ta on the in­di­vid­ual cell lev­el with sam­ples pro­vid­ed by neigh­bor­ing biobanks.

As its first big project, the team is de­vel­op­ing a cell at­las of the bone, an area where sig­nif­i­cant gaps in bi­o­log­i­cal un­der­stand­ing still ex­ist, ac­cord­ing to Rob­lin. It is im­por­tant, in his words, to ful­ly grasp the trans­la­tion­al route and en­sure the cell mod­els used in Re­la­tion’s labs are “as close to re­ca­pit­u­la­tion of dis­ease as pos­si­ble.”

“Mak­ing sure you work on the right things is a re­al­ly crit­i­cal prob­lem,” Ed­wards said.

Re­la­tion will al­so get help from Nvidia, which is giv­ing it ac­cess to the NVIDIA Cam­bridge-1 GPU su­per­com­put­er, which helps opens up new pos­si­bil­i­ties for look­ing at large stretch­es of DNA.

“Every­body runs in­to a com­pute lim­i­ta­tion, and that ba­si­cal­ly sets the width of the amount of DNA that you can look at in a sin­gle go,” he said. “So ac­cess to Cam­bridge lab, we ex­pect will give us some kind of break­through re­cep­tive fields with our mod­els.”

With “re­al­ly good R&D peo­ple” at the cen­ter of it all, Rob­lin said Re­la­tion will aim to grow from 15 to 40 staffers with the new cash. The com­pa­ny has al­so put to­geth­er a hefty sci­en­tif­ic ad­vi­so­ry board, in­clud­ing Michael Bron­stein (Ox­ford pro­fes­sor and head of graph AI at Twit­ter), as well as Alex Shalek and Car­o­line Uh­ler of the Broad In­sti­tute.

DCVC and Mag­net­ic Ven­tures co-led the fi­nanc­ing, with par­tic­i­pa­tion from Khosla Ven­tures, OMERS Ven­tures, and first­minute Cap­i­tal, plus a num­ber of in­di­vid­ual in­vestors.

Just as scientific innovation is essential to advancing health, systemic healthcare innovation is required to tackle health disparities. Factors outside of science – such as racism, discrimination, and lack of access to quality health care – create barriers that prevent some people from benefiting from hard-won scientific advancements. Innovation must go beyond science to address disparities in cancer care.

The last few decades have been years of amazing progress in how we approach cancer care: emphasizing regular screenings, early diagnoses and treatment with targeted therapies that are helping many patients live longer and healthier than ever before. We in the oncology community are proud of the hope we’ve brought to people facing this disease. However, the pandemic brought to light how health disparities can set us back from achieving our ultimate goal of eliminating cancer as a cause of death.

The new GSK has a new look. In a blend of familiar and modern, its vibrant orange brand color remains, while the now three letter-only name has been reimagined in a curvy contemporary logo update.

While the logo is the most visible change, the new GSK brand debuting Thursday is more than just a makeover. It’s a wholesale change for the 300-year-old company that, for the first time in its history, is no longer in the consumer healthcare business. The biopharma-only GSK has adopted a new purpose “to unite science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together” as well as a new strategy, ambitions and revamped brand identity.

Emma Walmsley’s bet on making GSK a pure play Big Pharma innovator just cleared a major milestone. But the GSK team is not home free yet.

The global player announced that its adult RSV vaccine cleared a Phase III trial — AReSVi 006 — offering “exceptional protection” to 25,000 enrollees over the age of 60, setting up a planned rollout with regulators. But while GSK cheered this as a clear success, and a landmark first, it’s keeping the key figure on efficacy in preventing severe infections under wraps for now, leaving the next big question of how this will look to regulators and industry rivals still unanswered.

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For the second straight day, the FDA’s Cellular, Tissue and Gene Therapies adcomm voted unanimously in favor of FDA approving a bluebird bio gene therapy, this time by a 13-0 vote in favor of beti-cel as a potential treatment for a blood disorder known as β-thalassemia for those who require regular blood transfusions.

The second straight unanimous thumbs up opens the potential for two FDA approvals later this summer for bluebird — although the agency on Friday raised some manufacturing concerns for both therapies.

The UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, or NICE, on Friday agreed to cover Amarin’s controversial cholesterol drug Vascepa, amidst turbulence for Amarin.

Amarin and NICE agreed to a price of £144.21 per 120 soft capsules (or $181 for 30-day supply), according to Amarin. Low-price generic versions of Vascepa, known as icosapent ethyl, cost about $100 in the US, according to GoodRx.

It’s clear from #ASCO22 that biopharma audiences are back, live, at the big conferences. That’s encouraging, as we return to more face-to-face meetings to advance the work at hand. But go behind the busy center stage, and you’ll see plenty of worrying signs that biotech — though not Big Pharma — is in for a rough ride. And just when it ends is anyone’s guess right now.

Sentiment is one thing, data another. And there’s no denying that the numbers have changed dramatically. We asked DealForma chief Chris Dokomajilar to crunch the numbers a little bit early for H1, in order to get a look at the trends in play here during a watershed year for the biotech industry.

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Paul Hastings doesn’t offer the usual biotech executive cliches. The ones endorsed by the media consultant crowd. And sometimes the Nkarta CEO doesn’t even wait for a question before jumping straight to his answers, his truth, as he likes to call it. And that was the way we started our conversation about his first year as chair of BIO, and how the next year is shaping up. Hastings will join our panel on managing a biotech during turbulent times, which will be available in a live setting in San Diego, or online. You can register for that — along with a lineup of virtual events — here. — John Carroll

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Back at the beginning of the year during JP Morgan, I came up with my usual set of projections for the year ahead and definitely got one thing wrong. The biotech IPO market, I said in January, would remain weak, creating a major funding issue for biotech.

Here’s me in a discussion with Catalent executive chairman John Chiminski:

What you’ve had for several years is a booming biotech field, lots of money pummeling into the business and pushing it up. So when you remove IPOs as an alternative source of money for a lot of companies, it will make deal-making more (attractive).

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Bioscience & Technology Business Center The University of Kansas Lawrence, Kansas

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