Debo Dutta Speeding New Medicines with AI and Computational Biology

In this Tech Barometer podcast segment, Debojyoti “Debo” Dutta, vice president of engineering, AI at Nutanix shares his passion for computational biology and how AI will dramatically change enterprises.

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Transcript:

Debo Dutta: If you look at what’s happening today, it’s not just because of AI, but in general because of high throughput data that can be generated out of a biological system. And the amount of data that you can generate was unimaginable even a few years ago.

Jason Lopez: In our series on MedPerf we wanted to introduce you to a computer scientist at the forefront of AI and machine learning development. Debojyoti Dutta, who goes by the nickname Debo. His work is bringing AI to IT leaders across many industries, including healthcare. This is the Tech Barometer podcast, I’m Jason Lopez.

[Related: Exploring Uses for AI in Healthcare]

Jason Lopez: When you hear about AI and how great it will be for healthcare, you might wonder, well who are the people making it happen? Debo is one of those technologists who’s working to connect the dots of computer science and medicine.

Debo Dutta: When coupled with AI, it’s going to completely change the way we design drugs, how we design antibodies, new therapeutics, I can’t even imagine all the things that we will be able to do using this iteration of AI coupled with the amount of data that we can generate out of living beings.

Jason Lopez: One area Debo thinks AI will have a profound effect is in examining medical images. For example, people with diabetes are at risk for loss of eyesight. With AI assistance, images of the inside of the eye could give doctors far earlier detection of diabetic retinopathy. Other imaging examples include detection of tumors and cancers. But another area where AI could bring a transformation...immunotherapy.

Debo Dutta: Immunotherapy in a nutshell is to program your immune system to fight bad actors in your body. The bad actors could be viruses, it could be cancer cells.

[Related: Building Infrastructure to Unlock AI’s Next Big Leap]

Jason Lopez: Our immune system can detect viruses, but sometimes cancer cells are invisible. Cancer cells can appear normal and the immune system allows them to go about wreaking havoc. In immunotherapy, the DNA of the immune system’s T-cells are changed to recognize the genetic strands of the tumor cell and destroy them.

Debo Dutta: Let’s see how AI gets into this space. So the programming, the existing T-cell can be done with gene therapy, but how do you know what to program? That’s where AI comes in. Using AI, you can rapidly design sequences. People are today looking at a lot of sequence data as well as literature, feeding them into large language models. And they are actually trying to generate candidate sequences for lab experiments.

Jason Lopez: Advances in large language models as well as computer infrastructure are cutting development times dramatically. Debo says what would have taken years might take a 10th or even a hundredth of the time.

Debo Dutta: I’m not an oncologist. I’m not a gene therapy researcher or an immunotherapy researcher, but I do believe that as a systems person, if I can help the lifecycle of the machine learning go faster, I can help them to make immunotherapy get better and better. We can cure more types of cancers and more diseases.

Jason Lopez: Debo was born in India. His mother is a retired doctor and his father a retired engineer. Those two professions are some of the most sought-after in the country and getting into a good university to pursue those professions is very competitive, and he was able to enroll in one of the top colleges in engineering where he opted to study computer science.

Debo Dutta: But I kept thinking about biology, but I didn’t do much about it.

Jason Lopez: After graduating, he came to the US to study for a PhD at the University of Southern California, and that’s when he saw another dimension to computer science.

Debo Dutta: It looks like pure science in many ways because it’s a lot of math, applied math and discrete math, and a lot of engineering too. But it can be applied to biology.

Jason Lopez: At USC he encountered a large team doing computational biology. And after his PhD, he had this thought:...