Pande: Drug discovery roles will shift from wet-lab chemistry to computational engineering
Vijay Pande · Pande & Conde: When (and How) Biology Becomes Engineering · Mar 23, 2018 · at 9:16
Vijay Pande, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), discusses how machine learning and Contract Research Organizations (CROs) are transforming pharmaceutical job functions.
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“I think I think we're already seeing a little bit of that with just the shift to CROs, where there's like not a purely medicinal chemist job, a sort of drug designer job. And medicinal chemists have so much great intuition and experience designing drugs that they've been sort of at the tip of the spear of that. But as, ah, ML starts being competitive and hopefully really helping them forward, there may be a new sort of job which is not doing the synthesis themselves. But actually just be a drug designer, a drug engineer throwing that aspirational term in there. And so that may be what's happening, especially if synthesis is done at a CRO somewhere else, then that design job, that engineering job, actually becomes the real one, and it sort of shifts the tools you look for. In the end, though, the ML has to work, right? I mean, if it doesn't work, then this is not gonna, then that, that future doesn't exist, or is in a different timeline.”
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