One of the most amazing successes in the battle against cancer over the last two decades has been the introduction of antibody drugs that harness the body’s own immune system to kill tumor cells. Finding those drugs may sound like a biology problem rather than a machine learning or a big-data problem. But actually, these days, it’s both. Harry's guest this week is Leonard Wossnig, who’s the chief technology officer for a UK company called LabGenius. The company uses a combination of synthetic biology, high-throughput assays, and machine learning to hunt for new drugs within a subclass of antibody medicines called T cell engagers that, loosely speaking, can grab tumor cells with one end and then grab tumor-killing T cells from the bloodstream with the other end. And Wossnig says the key to the whole thing is having the best data possible—meaning, data about their candidate T cell engagers and how specifically they bind to their targets in the lab assays. LabGenius has built an automated platform called EVA that runs experiment after experiment and uses active learning to zero in on T cell engagers with just the right ability to bind to their intended targets. One of the big takeaways from the interview is that companies that want to use AI to speed up drug discovery need the biggest, cleanest, and most consistent data sets possible.

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