
Exclusive: Pfizer vet grabs $25M seed round to 'integrate' machine learning, genomics tech in drug R&D
Having been involved in a number of attrition task force efforts during his tenure as European R&D chief at Pfizer, David Roblin tells me there’s a quote that resonates with him, uttered 20 years ago by South African biologist Sydney Brenner when he accepted a Nobel Prize.
“We are drowning in a sea of data but thirsty for knowledge,” is how Roblin remembers it.
But the way those data have been used to date — by drug discovery scientists trying to validate their ideas — hasn’t really improved the rate at which preclinical compounds become marketed drugs, he reckons. The potential he sees for machine learning and new technologies like single-cell transcriptomics to change that is the reason why, after eight years as chief of scientific translation at London’s Francis Crick Institute, he’s moving down the road to Relation Therapeutics, which has just closed a $25 million seed round.
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