Keep pulling the thread on Sajith Wickramasekara.
Johnson & Johnson's commercially successful cancer immunotherapy, Carvykti, was developed in partnership with the Chinese firm Legend Biotech and is now widely distributed in the U.S. for multiple myeloma.
Merck's blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda was an overlooked asset that had been through multiple acquisitions and was nearly divested before the company recognized its potential and invested heavily in its development.
Eli Lilly launched a federated learning project called TuneLab, which makes its internal AI models available to the scientific community on a "give-to-get" basis to train its models on external data.
Benchling co-founder Ashu Singhal transitioned from his management role, giving up all direct reports, to lead the company's AI initiatives full-time.
A Benchling customer used the deep research AI agent to analyze historical data, discovering that a planned eight-month mouse study was redundant because the experiments had already been performed years prior within the organization.
Large pharmaceutical companies are increasingly acquiring molecules from Chinese biotechs, a shift from their historical preference for sourcing from American biotech firms.
Chinese biotech companies have become major competitors by developing molecules and advancing them through early-phase clinical trials in China more quickly and cheaply than Western counterparts.
Large pharmaceutical companies have a significant AI advantage because their extensive experimental data generation capabilities allow them to train proprietary models at a scale most biotech startups cannot match.
Major AI labs, including DeepMind, Anthropic, and OpenAI, frequently highlight AI for drug discovery as a key application and mission for their technology.
Prescription drug sales account for 9% of total healthcare spending in the United States.
Benchling's software is used by approximately 1,300 biotech and pharmaceutical companies and by scientists at over 7,000 academic institutions worldwide.
Benchling's customer base includes major pharmaceutical companies such as Moderna, Sanofi, Eli Lilly, and Regeneron, as well as AI-focused biotech startups like Isomorphic Labs and Zera.