Steven Banerjee: How Machine Intelligence, NLP and AI is changing Health Care  

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Steven Banerjee is the CEO of NExTNet Inc. NExTNet is a Silicon Valley based technology startup pioneering natural language based Explainable AI platform to accelerate drug discovery and development. Steven is also the founder of Mekonos, a Silicon Valley based biotechnology company backed by world-class Institutional investors (pre-Series B) — pioneering proprietary cell and gene-engineering platforms to advance personalized medicine. He also advises Lumen Energy, a company that uses a radically simplified approach to deploy commercial solar. Lumen Energy makes it easy for building owners to get clean energy.  

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Steven Banerjee LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-banerjee/ 

Steven Banerjee Website: https://www.nextnetinc.com/ 

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Outline: 

Here’s the timestamps for the episode: 

(05:20)- So I am a mechanical engineer by training. And I started my graduate research in semiconductor technologies with applications in biotech almost more than a decade ago, in the early 2010s. I was a Doctoral Fellow at IBM labs here in San Jose, California. And then I also ended up writing some successful federal grants with a gene sequencing pioneer at Stanford, and Ron Davis, before I went, ended up going to UC Berkeley for grad school research, and then I became a visiting researcher.  

(09:28)- An average cost of bringing a drug to market is around $2.6 billion. It takes around 10 to 15 years, like from the earliest days of discovery, to launching into the market. And unfortunately, more than 96% of all drug R&D actually fails . This is a really bad social model. This creates this enormous burden on our society and our healthcare spending as well. One of the reasons I started NextNet was when I was running Mekonos, I kept on seeing a lot of our customers had this tremendous pain point of, where you go, there's all this demand and subject matter experts, as scientists, they're actually working with very little of the available biomedical evidence out there. And a lot of the times that actually leads to false discoveries. 

(13:40)- And so there are tools, they're all this plethora of bioinformatics tools and software and databases out there that are plagued with program bugs. They mostly lack documentation or have very complicated documentation and best, very technical UI’s. And for an average scientist or an average person in this industry, you really need to have a fairly deep grasp or a sophisticated understanding of database schemas and SQL querying and statistical modeling and coding and data science.  

(22:36)- So, a transformer is potentially one of the greatest breakthroughs that has happened in NLP recently. It's basically a neural net architecture that was incorporated into NLP models by Google Brain researchers that came along in 2017 and 2018. And before transformers, your state of the art models and NLP basically were like, LSTM, like long term memories are the widely used architecture. 

(27:24)- So Sapiens is, our goal here is to really make biomedical data accessible and useful for scientific inquiry, using this platform, so that, your average person and industry, let's say a wet lab or dry lab scientist, or a VP of R&D or CSO, or let's say a director of research can ask and answer complex biological questions. And a better frame hypothesis to understand is very complex, multifactorial diseases. And a lot of the insights that Sapiens is extracting from all this, with publicly available data sources are proprietary to the company. And then you can map and upload your own internal data, and begin to really contextualize all that information, by uploading onto the Sapiens.  

(31:34)- We are definitely looking for early adopters. This includes biotech companies, pharma, academic research labs, that would like to test out Sapiens and like this to be a part of their journey of their biomedical R&D. We're definitely, as I said, looking for investors who would like to partner with us, as we continue on this journey of building this probably one of the most sophisticated natural language based platforms, or as we call it, an excellent AI platform.