Sean & Greg — Biology and ML for Drug Discovery

Sean McClain is the founder and CEO, and Gregory Hannum is the VP of AI Research at Absci, a biotech company that's using deep learning to expedite drug discovery and development.

Lukas, Sean, and Greg talk about why Absci started investing so heavily in ML research (it all comes back to the data), what it'll take to build the GPT-3 of DNA, and where the future of pharma is headed. Sean and Greg also share some of the challenges of building cross-functional teams and combining two highly specialized fields like biology and ML.

The complete show notes (transcript and links) can be found here: http://wandb.me/gd-sean-and-greg

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Connect with Sean and Greg:

📍 Sean's Twitter: https://twitter.com/seanrmcclain

📍 Greg's Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregory_hannum

📍 Absci's Twitter: https://twitter.com/abscibio

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Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

0:53 How Absci merges biology and AI

11:24 Why Absci started investing in ML

19:00 Creating the GPT-3 of DNA

25:34 Investing in data collection and in ML teams

33:14 Clinical trials and Absci's revenue structure

38:17 Combining knowledge from different domains

45:22 The potential of multitask learning

50:43 Why biological data is tricky to work with

55:00 Outro

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