By Rebecca Stauffer, AAPS Staff
Joel Dudley, Ph.D., a partner at venture capital firm, Innovation Endeavors, launched the 2023 AAPS National Biotechnology Conference, by declaring this era as “the most exciting time in human history” when it comes to the development of novel treatments to address many unmet clinical needs.
“The state is set for ‘super evolution’ in biology,” he said, a term his firm, Innovation Endeavors, uses to categorize how advancements in data, computing, and engineering will lead to significant breakthroughs in biotech over the next decade.
Dudley, who previously served as Chief Scientific Officer for a health technology start-up and an Associate Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, detailed what his company looks for when evaluating whether or not to invest in a biotechnology firm.
Innovation Endeavors invests primarily in seed and series A companies “built around deep technical or scientific insights.”
“The absolute number of unmet clinical needs will grow with progress in precision medicine,” Dudley said. Innovative treatments will need to address conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), recurrent gioblastoma, and pancreatic cancer, among others, in addition to health disparities when it comes to deaths before age 75 from treatable conditions.
Investing in novel biotechnology does have challenges. Unlike Moore’s Law which says that the number of transistors per silicon chip doubles each year, Eroom’s Law (Moore’s Law backwards) states that despite progressions in technology, fewer new drugs are produced each year.
Dudley identified the following challenges that novel biotechnologies must overcome.
1. Address Complexity of Biological Systems
2. Biological Systems are Highly Context Dependent
3. Biological Search Spaces are Large and Not Well-Traversed
4. Current Translation Models Have Poor Predictive Validity
He believes biotech companies that fully invest in the capabilities of data have an edge.
“At our core, we believe in advanced computing and engineering applied to data at scale in biology,” Dudley said. “I mostly think about data in terms of complexity and scale.”
Some companies Innovation Endeavors has invested in or are considering, are involved in a number of innovative specialties, some of which Dudley’s company have not seen but would be open to investing in:
Novel scalable sensing and measurement technology
Non-destructive, real-time molecular sensing platforms
Better data and relevant models that reveal biology within context
Biological systems as design-and-compute systems
Super evolution delivery systems
Next-gen effector modalities
Programmable and executable therapeutics
Intelligent software for scientists
Technology-enabled clinical trials
As the industry moves into the phase of “super evolution,” Dudley believes the biotech companies of the near future will need to invest heavily in data science. Future scientists will need the skills to direct development using technology, or, as he sees it, scientists will be the ones feeding questions into the technology.
“These new companies will look different than they did previously,” he said. “They will look more like Google and lean heavier on software engineering and data science.”
[Author’s Note: On May 10, the U.S. FDA issued the discussion paper, “Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the Development of Drug and Biological Products.”