E518 Drew Linsley, Co-Founder and CEO at Operant Biopharma

Today's guest is Drew Linsley, Co-Founder and CEO at Operant Biopharma. Operant Biopharma's AI-powered robotic microscope learns to design drugs by watching and controlling diseases over time.  Their platform autonomously designs biological experiments, discovering and optimizing disease treatments. The company focuses on high-need areas like neurodegenerative and kidney diseases, aiming to horizontally address multiple indications and out-license discoveries, blending AI and biology for innovative therapeutic development.

Drew is also an Assistant Professor (Research) in Computational Neuroscience and AI at Brown University. He studies biological and artificial intelligence, and believes we need artificial vision to create intelligent machines capable of reasoning about the world. However, existing artificial vision systems struggle with many visual challenges that we routinely solve in our daily lives. He looks to biological vision to inspire new solutions to these challenges in artificial vision.

In this episode, Drew talks about:

Applying AI to analyze disease data and guide therapeutics autonomously,

How Robotic microscopy tracks dynamic biology to aid disease treatment advancements,

How AI optimizes drug discovery pipeline & manipulates cellular states for treatment,

Applying AI to drive horizontal drug development for diverse indications,

Their unique staffing needs within AI, biology and neuroscience