Brittany Trang, Ph.D., covers AI in health and medicine: Does it actually work? Who benefits, or might be harmed? She writes the weekly AI Prognosis newsletter. Follow her on Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. You can reach Brittany on Signal at btrang.01.SAN MATEO, Calif. — Peyton Greenside, CEO of BigHat Biosciences, has hot takes.
Her company designs antibody therapies using machine-learning, but she doesn’t like demos in which people open their computers and show off how fast they can design a drug. “If you want me to design you a protein right now in six hours, I’m happy to do it,” she said. In fact, she can do it in 20 minutes. But if you’re actually in the business of making drugs, you are still going to have to do all the downstream tests, which take time and lots of money, Greenside said. “That’s where the hard work is, is making the actual drug.”
BigHat, founded in 2019, has successfully completed a collaboration with Johnson & Johnson and has partnerships with Merck, Amgen, Abbvie, Lilly, and others. In keeping with its name, it hangs a hat on the wall in its office for every completed project. There are a lot of hats.
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