Next Phase Newsletter

By Rory McCann, Marketing Manager & Conference Producer, LSN

NVIDIA Global Healthcare AI Startups Lead, Renee Yao is shining a spotlight on exceptional AI startups using their technology to advance drug discovery. This startup showcase will feature leaders from three AI companies – Entos, Insilico Medicine, and nference – at next week’s 4D Meets AI digital partnering conference.

The startups showcase complements the mission of 4D Meets AI in its goal of highlighting exceptional AI technology and its applications in advancing healthcare. 4D Meets AI promotes and facilitates conversations that lead to deals funding the future of AI technology improving medical care and overall health for future generations.

There’s still time to sign up for 4D Meets AI, March 18-19. If you’re fundraising for your AI technology, you don’t want to miss this partnering experience! Check out NVIDIA’s startup showcase and sign up to start meeting with early-stage companies, investors, service providers, and strategic partners advancing AI technology for health and wellness.

NVIDIA Inception Drug Discovery AI Startup Showcase
Moderator: Renee Yao, Global Healthcare AI Startups Lead, NVIDIA
Pharma companies’ overall venture investments have grown steadily over the last 5 years — but AI has emerged as a standout area of investment, with pharma incumbent-backed healthcare AI funding growing more than 10x since 2018. In this talk, you will hear about NVIDIA inception program benefits for healthcare AI startups and hear about a few cutting-edge drug discovery AI startups’ latest breakthroughs.

Accelerating Molecular Discovery through GPU-Enabled Physics-Based Machine Learning
Tom Miller, PhD, CEO, Entos, Inc.

GPU-Enabled Generative Biology and Generative Chemistry for End-to-End Drug Discovery
Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, Founder & CEO, Insilico Medicine

nference: Making Biomedical Knowledge Computable
Tyler Wagner, PhD, Senior Director, Biomedical Research, nference

Speaker Bios

Renee Yao, Global Healthcare AI Startups Lead, NVIDIA (Moderator)
Renee Yao leads global healthcare AI startups at NVIDIA, managing 1000+ healthcare startups in digital health, medical instrument, medical imaging, genomics, and drug discovery segments. Previously she worked as a senior product manager and product marketing manager for AI Systems at NVIDIA.

Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, Founder & CEO, Insilico Medicine
Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine (insilico.com), a leader in next-generation artificial intelligence technologies for drug discovery, biomarker development. He is also the founder and CEO of Deep Longevity, Inc, a global company developing a broad range of artificial intelligence-based biomarkers of aging and longevity. Since 2015 he invented critical technologies in the field of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning (RL) for generation of the novel molecular structures with the desired properties and generation of synthetic biological and patient data. He also pioneered the applications of deep learning technologies for prediction of human biological age using multiple data types, transfer learning from aging into disease, target identification, and signaling pathway modeling. Under his leadership Insilico raised over $50 million in multiple rounds from expert investors, opened R&D centers in 6 countries and regions, and partnered with multiple pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and academic institutions. Prior to founding Insilico, he worked in senior roles at ATI Technologies (acquired by AMD in 2006), NeuroG Neuroinformatics, Biogerontology Research Foundation. Since 2012 he published over 130 peer-reviewed research papers, and 2 books including “The Ageless Generation: How Biomedical Advances Will Transform the Global Economy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He serves on the editorial boards of Aging Research Reviews, Aging, Trends in Molecular Medicine, Frontiers in Genetics, and co-chairs the Annual Aging Research, Drug Discovery and AI Forum (7th annual in 2020) at Basel Life, one of Europe’s largest industry events in drug discovery. He is the adjunct professor of artificial intelligence at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

Tom Miller, PhD, CEO, Entos, Inc.

Tom Miller is a scientist and entrepreneur with a focus on AI-driven methods for molecular simulation and discovery. Following a PhD at Oxford and a postdoc at UC Berkeley, he joined the Caltech faculty in 2008 and was promoted to full professor in 2013. He has published more than 120 peer-reviewed articles and received awards for research excellence from the Sloan Foundation, Dreyfus Foundation, and American Chemical Society. He has mentored dozens of students and postdocs that are now leaders in academics and industry. In 2020, Tom co-founded Entos, Inc. to accelerate molecular and materials discovery via physics-based machine learning. In the past year, Entos has recruited over 25 world-class AI researchers, software engineers, and drug discovery scientists and continues to grow.

Tyler Wagner, PhD, Senior Director, Biomedical Research, nference
Dr. Tyler Wagner is the Senior Director of Biomedical Research at nference and has been with the company for over 3 years. Prior to joining nference, Dr. Wagner obtained his PhD in the Weiss lab (MIT) and Densmore lab (BU) where he engineered both an RNA virus and mRNA into multi-functional platforms for regulated gene delivery. He continued with a postdoc in the Weiss lab where he explored in vivo regulatory strategies for RNA therapeutics. At nference, he is currently leading clinical research projects with multiple pharma companies and the Mayo Clinic, ranging from early detection of disease to real-world outcomes assessment, and is working to apply machine learning to outstanding questions in multiple therapeutic areas, including cardiology, oncology, and neuroscience.

By Rory McCann, Marketing Manager & Conference Producer, LSN

Life Science Nation (LSN)’s 4D Meets AI is taking a closer look at strategic partnerships March 18-19. The question kept coming up over the past several months, particularly with companies working with AI: What should early-stage fundraising companies be looking for beyond a check? Should they be prioritizing technology or team fit, market strategy, industry expertise, service provider connections, etc.? To answer these questions, we are bringing the buyers and sellers together to discuss these topics and more.

Each 4D Meets AI panel features investors in AI technology and their portfolio companies to discuss their process, from pitch to partners, in order that current fundraising executives can broaden their definition of what a successful partnership looks like and use it to inform their process. Additionally, Renee Yao, Global Healthcare AI Startups Lead at NVIDIA joins the program to showcase outstanding startups in the Inception accelerator, highlighting yet another style of partnership designed to support AI companies.

Early-stage entrepreneurship can be a challenging journey that truly takes a village of community support. 4D Meets AI is broadening the definition of what successful partnering looks like in order that fundraising executives can take advantage of the many relationships necessary for growth. We hope you’ll join us and lend your voice to the conversation!