It was a difficult year for biotechs with drops in the major biotech indices, fewer new drug approvals, and more than 125 companies announcing layoffs. But there were also triumphs to celebrate. We continue our annual tradition of ending the old year and ushering in the new one with Adam Feuerstein, Polk Award Winning journalist and senior biotech writer for STAT. We discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of biotech in 2022; Feuerstein’s annual best and worst CEO list; and what’s ahead at JPMorgan and beyond in 2023.

The Year in Biotech and What’s Ahead in 2023

ProFound Therapeutics has developed platform technology to catalogue and understand previously undetected human proteins and the role they play in health and disease. By focusing on proteins in the process of translation, the company said it has identified tens of thousands of undiscovered proteins that can provide untapped therapeutic targets. We spoke to Avak Kahvejian, co-founder and CEO of ProFound Therapeutics, about the company’s platform technology, the vastness of the unexplored proteome it seeks to discover, and how this can lead to the development of breakthrough medicines.

Searching the Dark Matter of the Proteome to Develop New Therapies

When people think of the potential for artificial intelligence to impact the biopharmaceutical industry, the focus is usually on drug discovery or in the clinic to help guide decision making with regards to pairing the right drug to the right patient. Yseop is focused on a more mundane use for the technology—the writing of clinical data reports. The company had been working in the financial services industry when it was approached by Sanofi to see if it could apply its natural language generation to make the creation of these reports faster and less expensive. We spoke to Emmanuel Walckenaer, CEO of Yseop, about artificial intelligence, its potential to change the way biopharmaceutical companies work in non-obvious ways, and why a large number of biopharmaceutical companies are turning AI to do more with less.

How AI Is Finding Its Way into Unexpected Places in Biopharma Companies

There’s been growing interest in exploring the potential of psychedelics to treat neuropsychiatric conditions. Onsero Therapeutics is part of a growing list of companies that are developing therapies that target the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, the receptor to which several of psychedelics bind, and one that has been clinically validated in a number of psychiatric conditions. The company believes the therapies it’s developing have the potential to provide the treatment benefits of these substances without their better-known effects. We spoke to Tim Piser, chief scientific officer of Onsero, about the case for these drugs to treat conditions like mood disorder, how it’s developing its experimental therapies so they don’t induce effects, and why he believes benefits of these drugs can exist independently of them packing a psychedelic punch.

Treating Psychiatric Conditions with Tripless Psychedelics

Providers hold vast amounts of health data that can be harnessed to gain better insights into diseases, improve outcomes for patients, and help bring about an era of precision medicine. Despite advances in artificial intelligence to capitalize on these stores of data, much of it has remained siloed and out of the reach of researchers and drug developers who could put it to use. Last year, a group of 14 health providers caring for tens of millions of patients through thousands of care facilities across the country formed Truveta, a company that has built an AI platform to make structured and de-identified patient data available for research. We spoke to Terry Myerson, CEO of Truveta, about its platform technology, the work it is enabling today, and how AI and the availability of real-world data is changing how biomedical research is conducted.

Changing Outcomes with Data

The gut is the body’s largest sensory organ with a surface area 100 times that of the skin. It contains more nerve cells than the spinal cord, most of the immune system, and 95 percent of the body’s serotonin. Kallyope has assembled a discovery and translation platform to developed therapies to treat metabolic, gastrointestinal, and neurologic conditions by targeting the gut-brain connection. We spoke to Nancy Thornberry, chair of R&D for Kallyope, about the gut-brain connection, the company’s platform technology, and the case for targeting these interactions to treat a wide range of conditions.

A Company Where It takes Guts and Brains to Develop Drugs

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