Niven Narain and How AI and Machine Learning Are Changing Drug Discovery

Harry interviews Niven Narain, the co-founder, president and CEO of Berg, a Boston-based biopharma company driving the next generation of drugs and diagnostics by combining patient-driven biology and AI to unravel actionable disease insight. Narain has overseen development of Berg’s clinical stage assets and pipeline and forged strategic partnerships with industry academic and US and UK governments. He says Berg's philosophy is to combine a systems biology architecture with patients' demographic data and clinical outcome data, and then apply Bayesian artificial intelligence algorithms to drive better understanding of diseases.

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Transcript

Harry Glorikian: Welcome to the Moneyball medicine podcast I'm your host Harry Glorikian. This series is all about the data-driven transformation of the healthcare and life sciences landscape. Each episode we dive deep through one-on-one interviews with leaders in the new cost-conscious value-based healthcare economy. We look at the challenges and opportunities they're facing and their predictions for the years to come.

Okay welcome to another edition of Moneyball Medicine. Today I have Niven Narayan who is co-founder president and CEO of Berg, a Boston-based biopharma company driving the next generation of drugs and Diagnostics by combining patient driven biology and artificial intelligence to unravel actionable disease insight. He has overseen development of Berg's clinical stage assets and pipeline and forged strategic partners with industry academia and US and UK government's.

Niven is most passionate about improving patient care and enabling increased access to innovative medicines to improve healthcare outcomes.

Niven welcome to Moneyball Medicine podcast, it's great to spend time together again.

Niven Narain: It’s great to be on again, Harry, it's always good to catch up and I think it's such an important continuous dialogue you know given how quickly technology is moving in healthcare. So, again happy to be on.

Harry Glorikian: I had the pleasure of learning about Berg and coming in and taking a look at your systems and being brought up to speed, on what you guys are doing during the writing of Moneyball Medicine. But since then you know and maybe for the people listening for the first time and who don't know the company. Can you tell me a little bit about you know this whole concept that you have of a artificial-intelligence, drug discovery model engine and where we were back what two plus years ago and where you are now?

Niven Narain: Yes, sure you know, so the company was really founded on this the philosophy that we should at this point in developed and this is about ten years back. We took a good hard look of how could we use biology in a more fundamental sense to drive a greater understanding of diseases. But importantly how our disease is different than a healthy, an otherwise healthy individual or a healthy cell or a healthy tissue. And the approach that we took at that time was really to combine a systems biology architecture with a combination of a patient's demographic data, their clinical outcome data.

And then we wanted to look at a nove...