Machine learning and AI in biological science, drug discovery and medicine

Sir Adrian Smith

President, the Royal Society

Adrian Smith became President of the Royal Society on 30 November 2020. He is also Institute Director and Chief Executive of The Alan Turing Institute.

He is a mathematician with expertise in Bayesian statistics. This branch of mathematics represents uncertainties in the form of probabilities, which are then modified through the mechanism of Bayes theorem as new information becomes available. Adrian's comprehensive publications on diverse areas of Bayesian statistics have had a major impact on statistical practice in a wide range of disciplines and application areas.

Between 2008-2012, he was Director General, Knowledge and Innovation in BIS (now BEIS) and has previously worked with the UK Higher Education Funding and Research Councils. Adrian is Chair of the Board of the Diamond Light Source and is also a board member of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. In 2017, he carried out a review of the maths curriculum for 16-18 year olds for the Treasury and Department for Education. In the 2011 New Year Honours list, he was awarded the title of Knight Bachelor.

Dr Demis Hassabis CBE FREng FRS

DeepMind

Demis Hassabis is the founder and CEO of DeepMind, the world’s leading AI research company, and now a part of Alphabet. Founded in 2010, DeepMind has been at the forefront of the field ever since, producing landmark research breakthroughs such as AlphaGo, the first program to beat the world champion at the complex game of Go, and AlphaFold, which was heralded as a solution to the 50-year grand challenge of protein folding.

A chess and programming child prodigy, Demis coded the classic AI simulation game Theme Park aged 17. After graduating from Cambridge University in computer science with a double first, he founded pioneering videogames company Elixir Studios, and completed a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at UCL investigating memory and imagination processes.

His work has been cited over 70000 times and has featured in Science’s top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year on 4 separate occasions. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2017 he featured in the Time 100 list of most influential people, and in 2018 he was awarded a CBE.

Dr Anne Phelan

BenevolentAI, UK

Dr Anne Phelan is BenevolentAI’s Chief Scientific Officer and is responsible for all aspects of drug discovery from therapeutic area selection through to target identification, building BenevolentAI’s drug discovery portfolio and delivering candidate molecules to clinical development. She is also the Site Head for BenevolentAI’s Cambridge Laboratories.

Anne’s key strengths focus on promoting organisational delivery and productivity. She is passionate about building high-functioning and cohesive teams with equal gender representation at every level that are committed to delivering life-changing medicines to the clinic.

Anne has over 25 years of experience in pharma and biotech and has worked on all stages from early discovery to late-stage drug development. Before joining BenevolentAI, Anne worked for pharma (Pfizer) and biotech (Mission Therapeutics), across a wide range of therapeutic areas including fibrosis, pain, arthritis and rheumatology, and neurodegeneration. She was Head of Pharmacology and Chief Operating Officer for Pfizer in the UK where she was responsible for the generation of primary and secondary data to support the portfolio.

Anne holds a BSc and PhD in Genetics from the University of Liverpool, UK.

Dr Imran Haque

Recursion Pharmaceuticals

Dr Haque leads data science at Recursion, an interdisciplinary group spanning AI/ML, computational biology and computational chemistry that aims to build and apply Recursion’s maps of biology for drug discovery. Prior to Recursion, he was the first chief scientific officer at Freenome, leading R&D in developing early detection tests for colorectal cancer, and conducted guideline-changing research as VP Scientific Affairs at Counsyl (now Myriad Women's Health).

He earned his BSc degree from UC Berkeley and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University, where his research on large-scale machine learning systems for drug discovery was co-advised by Vijay Pande and Daphne Koller.

Professor Walter Kolch

University College Dublin

Walter Kolch is the Director of Systems Biology Ireland and the Precision Oncology Ireland Consortium. Trained as an MD, he has worked in experimental clinical research, pharmaceutical industry, and basic biological research. Before moving to Dublin in 2009 he held a chair for molecular cell biology at the University of Glasgow and was a senior group leader at the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research in Glasgow, Scotland.

Walter is best known for his work in oncogene signal transduction, proteomics, systems biology, and precision medicine. He is ranked No. 3 in world in precision oncology by citations. He has made salient contributions to elucidating the function of the Raf kinases and the ERK pathway, and more recently to understand network-wide effects of oncogenes. His current research interest focuses on understanding molecular mechanisms of malignant transformation, network-mediated drug resistance in cancer, and the construction of Digital Twins for personalized cancer diagnosis and therapy.

Walter serves on several editorial boards and scientific advisory boards and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Professor Walter Kolch

University College Dublin

Walter Kolch is the Director of Systems Biology Ireland and the Precision Oncology Ireland Consortium. Trained as an MD, he has worked in experimental clinical research, pharmaceutical industry, and basic biological research. Before moving to Dublin in 2009 he held a chair for molecular cell biology at the University of Glasgow and was a senior group leader at the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research in Glasgow, Scotland.

Walter is best known for his work in oncogene signal transduction, proteomics, systems biology, and precision medicine. He is ranked No. 3 in world in precision oncology by citations. He has made salient contributions to elucidating the function of the Raf kinases and the ERK pathway, and more recently to understand network-wide effects of oncogenes. His current research interest focuses on understanding molecular mechanisms of malignant transformation, network-mediated drug resistance in cancer, and the construction of Digital Twins for personalized cancer diagnosis and therapy.

Walter serves on several editorial boards and scientific advisory boards and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Dr Imran Haque

Recursion Pharmaceuticals

Dr Haque leads data science at Recursion, an interdisciplinary group spanning AI/ML, computational biology and computational chemistry that aims to build and apply Recursion’s maps of biology for drug discovery. Prior to Recursion, he was the first chief scientific officer at Freenome, leading R&D in developing early detection tests for colorectal cancer, and conducted guideline-changing research as VP Scientific Affairs at Counsyl (now Myriad Women's Health).

He earned his BSc degree from UC Berkeley and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University, where his research on large-scale machine learning systems for drug discovery was co-advised by Vijay Pande and Daphne Koller.

Dr Anne Phelan

BenevolentAI, UK

Dr Anne Phelan is BenevolentAI’s Chief Scientific Officer and is responsible for all aspects of drug discovery from therapeutic area selection through to target identification, building BenevolentAI’s drug discovery portfolio and delivering candidate molecules to clinical development. She is also the Site Head for BenevolentAI’s Cambridge Laboratories.

Anne’s key strengths focus on promoting organisational delivery and productivity. She is passionate about building high-functioning and cohesive teams with equal gender representation at every level that are committed to delivering life-changing medicines to the clinic.

Anne has over 25 years of experience in pharma and biotech and has worked on all stages from early discovery to late-stage drug development. Before joining BenevolentAI, Anne worked for pharma (Pfizer) and biotech (Mission Therapeutics), across a wide range of therapeutic areas including fibrosis, pain, arthritis and rheumatology, and neurodegeneration. She was Head of Pharmacology and Chief Operating Officer for Pfizer in the UK where she was responsible for the generation of primary and secondary data to support the portfolio.

Anne holds a BSc and PhD in Genetics from the University of Liverpool, UK.

Professor Andreas Bender

University of Cambridge and Pangea Botanica

Dr Andreas Bender is a Professor for Molecular Informatics at Cambridge University as well as Chief Technology & Informatics Officer (CITO) at PangeAI, part of Pangea Botanica. Previously he was a Director for Digital Life Sciences at Nuvisan in Berlin, as well as as an Associate Director for Data Science and AI in the Clinical Pharmacology & Safety Sciences group at AstraZeneca.

In his work, Andreas is involved in the integration and analysis of chemical and biological data from different sources, such as structural and bioactivity data, gene expression readouts, cellular imaging data, pathway information, etc. The computational analysis of this information then aims to understand phenotypic compound action such as cellular readouts and organism-level effects on a mechanistic level, predicting molecular properties related to compound efficacy and toxicity, as well as compound repurposing.

On the entrepreneurial side, Andreas was involved in setting up Healx Ltd (for data-driven drug repurposing) and PharmEnable Ltd (for designing novel chemistry for targets that are difficult to drug conventionally), both based in Cambridge, UK. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and worked in the Lead Discovery Informatics group at Novartis in Cambridge, MA as well as at Leiden University in the Netherlands before his current post.

Dr Lucy Colwell

University of Cambridge, UK

Lucy Colwell is a faculty member in chemistry at the University of Cambridge and a science lead on the Brain team at Google Research. Her primary interests are in the application of machine learning to better understand the relationship between the sequence and function of biological macromolecules.

Before moving to Cambridge in 2013, Lucy received her PhD from Harvard University and held an EPSRC fellowship at the MRC-LMB and the Department of Applied Mathematics at Cambridge, and membership of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

In 2018 Lucy was appointed a Simons Investigator in the Mathematical Modelling of Living Systems.

Professor Charlotte Deane MBE

University of Oxford

Charlotte is Professor of Structural Bioinformatics in the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford and Chief Scientist of Biologics AI at Exscientia. She is also a co-director of the Systems Approaches to Biomedical Research Centre for Doctoral Training which she founded in 2009.

She served on SAGE, the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and acted as UK Research and Innovation’s COVID-19 Response Director. She has held numerous senior roles at the University of Oxford and until recently was the Deputy Executive Chair of the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to COVID-19 research.

At Oxford, Charlotte leads the Oxford Protein Informatics Group (OPIG), who work on diverse problems across immunoinformatics, protein structure and small molecule drug discovery using statistics, AI and computation to generate biological and medical insight.

Her work focuses on the development of novel algorithms, tools and databases that are openly available to the community. These tools are widely used web resources and are also part of several Pharma drug discovery pipelines. Charlotte is on several advisory boards and has consulted extensively with industry. She has set up a consulting arm within her own research group as a way of promoting industrial interaction and use of the group’s software tools.

Professor Andreas Bender

University of Cambridge and Pangea Botanica

Dr Andreas Bender is a Professor for Molecular Informatics at Cambridge University as well as Chief Technology & Informatics Officer (CITO) at PangeAI, part of Pangea Botanica. Previously he was a Director for Digital Life Sciences at Nuvisan in Berlin, as well as as an Associate Director for Data Science and AI in the Clinical Pharmacology & Safety Sciences group at AstraZeneca.

In his work, Andreas is involved in the integration and analysis of chemical and biological data from different sources, such as structural and bioactivity data, gene expression readouts, cellular imaging data, pathway information, etc. The computational analysis of this information then aims to understand phenotypic compound action such as cellular readouts and organism-level effects on a mechanistic level, predicting molecular properties related to compound efficacy and toxicity, as well as compound repurposing.

On the entrepreneurial side, Andreas was involved in setting up Healx Ltd (for data-driven drug repurposing) and PharmEnable Ltd (for designing novel chemistry for targets that are difficult to drug conventionally), both based in Cambridge, UK. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and worked in the Lead Discovery Informatics group at Novartis in Cambridge, MA as well as at Leiden University in the Netherlands before his current post.

Professor Charlotte Deane MBE

University of Oxford

Charlotte is Professor of Structural Bioinformatics in the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford and Chief Scientist of Biologics AI at Exscientia. She is also a co-director of the Systems Approaches to Biomedical Research Centre for Doctoral Training which she founded in 2009.

She served on SAGE, the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and acted as UK Research and Innovation’s COVID-19 Response Director. She has held numerous senior roles at the University of Oxford and until recently was the Deputy Executive Chair of the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to COVID-19 research.

At Oxford, Charlotte leads the Oxford Protein Informatics Group (OPIG), who work on diverse problems across immunoinformatics, protein structure and small molecule drug discovery using statistics, AI and computation to generate biological and medical insight.

Her work focuses on the development of novel algorithms, tools and databases that are openly available to the community. These tools are widely used web resources and are also part of several Pharma drug discovery pipelines. Charlotte is on several advisory boards and has consulted extensively with industry. She has set up a consulting arm within her own research group as a way of promoting industrial interaction and use of the group’s software tools.

Dr Lucy Colwell

University of Cambridge, UK

Lucy Colwell is a faculty member in chemistry at the University of Cambridge and a science lead on the Brain team at Google Research. Her primary interests are in the application of machine learning to better understand the relationship between the sequence and function of biological macromolecules.

Before moving to Cambridge in 2013, Lucy received her PhD from Harvard University and held an EPSRC fellowship at the MRC-LMB and the Department of Applied Mathematics at Cambridge, and membership of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

In 2018 Lucy was appointed a Simons Investigator in the Mathematical Modelling of Living Systems.

Aditya Nori

Microsoft Health Futures

Aditya Nori leads healthcare research and delivery within Microsoft Health Futures, which aims to empower every person on the planet to live a healthier future. He leads the following research and incubation programmes: Biomedical Imaging, Biomedical NLP (natural language processing), Biomedical Signal Processing and Health Access/Equity.

Previously, Aditya founded the Health Intelligence theme at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK, with a mission to transform the practice of medicine via trustworthy and human-centred AI. As a researcher at MSR, he has developed AI-based productivity tools for cancer treatment (The InnerEye Project) and explored various synergies between programming languages and machine learning. This has inspired new perspectives in formal verification, probabilistic programming, and reliable machine learning. He has developed several programmer productivity tools, including the 2nd generation of the Static Driver Verifier toolkit for Microsoft Windows.

Dr Kim Branson

GSK

Dr Kim Branson is Senior Vice President and Global Head of AI/ML at GSK, based in San Francisco. He leads the GSK.ai team, a global organization of 100 machine learning researchers and engineers who are pioneering the application of AI to drug discovery and development.

Kim brings a deep expertise in modelling and machine learning to drug and vaccine discovery, combining perspectives spanning academia to technology start-up. Under his leadership, GSK has built one of the industry’s few completely in-house AI efforts to leverage the potential of complex genetic data and maximize GSK’s industry-leading collaborations.

Kim joined GSK from Genentech where he was Head of AI, Early Clinical Development. He has been involved in large-scale machine learning and medical informatics initiatives for more than 20 years, over a range of ventures from computational drug design to disease risk prediction.

Previously, Kim helped found several Silicon Valley start-ups, including Discovery Engine (acquired by Twitter), Gliimpse as Chief Scientist (acquired by Apple) and Lumiata, a predictive health analytics company.

Kim received degrees from the University of Adelaide and a PhD from the University of Melbourne. He was a Peter Doherty fellow and did his postdoctoral training at Stanford University.

Professor Daphne Koller

insitro, US

Daphne Koller is CEO and Founder of insitro, a machine learning-driven drug discovery company.

She was the co-founder and co-CEO of Coursera, an online education platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs), which has reached over 100 million learners worldwide. Previously Daphne was the Rajeev Motwani Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where she served on the faculty for 18 years, and remains an Adjunct Faculty member. She is the author of over 300 refereed publications appearing in venues such as Science, Cell, Nature Genetics, NeurIPS, and ICML, with an h-index of over 145.

In 2012 she was recognized as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people and Newsweek’s 10 most important people in 2010. She received the Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship in 1996, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 1998, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 1999, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 2001, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004, the ACM Prize in Computing in 2008, the ACM AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2019, the IEEE CS Women of ENIAC Computer Pioneer award and the AnitaB.org Technical Leadership Abie Award Winner in 2022.

Daphne was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 and elected a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 2004, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014 and the International Society of Computational Biology in 2017.

Her teaching has been recognized via the Stanford Medal for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research and she is also a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.

Professor Daphne Koller

insitro, US

Daphne Koller is CEO and Founder of insitro, a machine learning-driven drug discovery company.

She was the co-founder and co-CEO of Coursera, an online education platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs), which has reached over 100 million learners worldwide. Previously Daphne was the Rajeev Motwani Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where she served on the faculty for 18 years, and remains an Adjunct Faculty member. She is the author of over 300 refereed publications appearing in venues such as Science, Cell, Nature Genetics, NeurIPS, and ICML, with an h-index of over 145.

In 2012 she was recognized as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people and Newsweek’s 10 most important people in 2010. She received the Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship in 1996, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 1998, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 1999, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 2001, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004, the ACM Prize in Computing in 2008, the ACM AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2019, the IEEE CS Women of ENIAC Computer Pioneer award and the AnitaB.org Technical Leadership Abie Award Winner in 2022.

Daphne was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 and elected a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 2004, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014 and the International Society of Computational Biology in 2017.

Her teaching has been recognized via the Stanford Medal for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research and she is also a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.

Aditya Nori

Microsoft Health Futures

Aditya Nori leads healthcare research and delivery within Microsoft Health Futures, which aims to empower every person on the planet to live a healthier future. He leads the following research and incubation programmes: Biomedical Imaging, Biomedical NLP (natural language processing), Biomedical Signal Processing and Health Access/Equity.

Previously, Aditya founded the Health Intelligence theme at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK, with a mission to transform the practice of medicine via trustworthy and human-centred AI. As a researcher at MSR, he has developed AI-based productivity tools for cancer treatment (The InnerEye Project) and explored various synergies between programming languages and machine learning. This has inspired new perspectives in formal verification, probabilistic programming, and reliable machine learning. He has developed several programmer productivity tools, including the 2nd generation of the Static Driver Verifier toolkit for Microsoft Windows.

Dr Kim Branson

GSK

Dr Kim Branson is Senior Vice President and Global Head of AI/ML at GSK, based in San Francisco. He leads the GSK.ai team, a global organization of 100 machine learning researchers and engineers who are pioneering the application of AI to drug discovery and development.

Kim brings a deep expertise in modelling and machine learning to drug and vaccine discovery, combining perspectives spanning academia to technology start-up. Under his leadership, GSK has built one of the industry’s few completely in-house AI efforts to leverage the potential of complex genetic data and maximize GSK’s industry-leading collaborations.

Kim joined GSK from Genentech where he was Head of AI, Early Clinical Development. He has been involved in large-scale machine learning and medical informatics initiatives for more than 20 years, over a range of ventures from computational drug design to disease risk prediction.

Previously, Kim helped found several Silicon Valley start-ups, including Discovery Engine (acquired by Twitter), Gliimpse as Chief Scientist (acquired by Apple) and Lumiata, a predictive health analytics company.

Kim received degrees from the University of Adelaide and a PhD from the University of Melbourne. He was a Peter Doherty fellow and did his postdoctoral training at Stanford University.

Jia-Yi Har

Cathay Capital

Jia-Yi Har is a Managing Director at Cathay Health, a venture fund investing in early-stage convergence medicine companies developing technologies to address unmet medical needs along the healthcare value chain, from upstream drug development, clinical trial innovations, life science tools, diagnostics, advanced therapeutics platforms to downstream digital health solutions and connected devices.

Jia-Yi brings nearly 20 years of professional experience in a career spanning healthcare investment, venture building, business management and scientific research. Prior to joining Cathay, she was part of the healthcare private equity team at Partners Group, a global private equity firm with $120 billion asset under management. Thereafter, she led Philips Healthcare’s Asia Pacific Imaging Software business and embarked on an entrepreneurial journey where she built and scaled early-stage health ventures in digital on-demand homecare and genetics. 

Prior to her business career, Jia Yi was an academic researcher in microbial genetics and biophysics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and National University of Singapore. Jia-Yi holds a MSc in Civil & Environmental Engineering from MIT, where she received the Schoettler and Linden Earth System Fellowships. 

Prof Eoin McKinney

University of Cambridge

Professor Eoin McKinney is the Versus Arthritis Chair of Rheumatology in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, an honorary consultant in nephrology and transplantation at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and a faculty member of the Cambridge Centre for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine.

His laboratory research explores ‘systems immunology’, studying the interface between immune responses to infection and those driving inflammatory pathology by applying machine learning methods to the integration of multi-omics data. He also explores the building of interpretable predictive models for rapid translation into clinical practice while informing underlying disease biology and identifying novel therapeutic strategies for inflammatory diseases.

Dr Thomas Callender

University College London

Tom Callender trained in medicine in Manchester, Oxford and London before specialising in public health and becoming a clinical academic at UCL, currently supported by a fellowship from the Wellcome Trust.

As a researcher, his focus has been on the early detection of cancer, developing the first model of a polygenic risk-stratified screening programme for prostate cancer and now AI tools for risk-stratifying lung cancer screening.

For his clinical and academic work, he has received the McEwan Award from the UK Faculty of Public Health and an American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Scholar-in-Training Award.

Dr Danielle Belgrave

DeepMind

Dr Danielle Belgrave is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind, where she leads a team focusing on machine learning for scientific discovery in health. Her research focuses on integrating medical domain knowledge, machine learning and causal modelling frameworks to understand health.

Prior to joining DeepMind she led a team working on AI for mental health in the Healthcare Intelligence group at Microsoft Research and was a tenured research fellow at Imperial College London.

She obtained a BSc in Mathematics and Statistics from London School of Economics, an MSc in Statistics from University College London and a PhD in the area of machine learning in health applications from the University of Manchester.

Dr Belgrave serves on a number of boards including the UCL AI Centre for Doctoral Training, The Association for Health, Learning and Inference and Women in Machine Learning. She has been Program Chair (2022) and Tutorial Chair (2019, 2020) for NeurIPS, the largest international Machine Learning Conference.