Moneyball Medicine

Harry's guest this week, Jen Nwankwo, is the founder and CEO of a drug discovery company in Boston called 1910 Genetics. Her PhD is in pharmacology, which shows through in her practical focus on fixing the drug discovery process to get more and better therapies into the hands of doctors. To hear Jen tell it, 1910 Genetics is focused on finding the most promising new drug candidates for stubborn health problems—and it takes a refreshingly agnostic approach to everything else. The company doesn’t hunt for just small-molecule drugs or just protein therapies. It explores both. It doesn’t utilize just one form of neural networking or machine learning. It uses whatever model produces the best science for a given problem. It doesn’t hunt for drugs using just wet lab data or just computational simulations. It does both. It isn’t just assembling its own pipeline of drugs or just partnering with larger pharma companies. It’s working on both. Jen wasn’t even dead set on being an entrepreneur—she had to be talked into ap