From The Genomics Revolution To The Next Frontier In Biology With The CEO Of Cellanome

So maybe let's start off with the state of biology and scientific progress.

You know, you've spent much of your career during the genomics revolution.

What did genomics deliver that exceeded expectations, in your opinion? And where did it ultimately fall

short? In so many respects, it has actually, and it continues to actually exceed my expectations.

It's hard to believe that, gosh, it was... maybe about 20 years ago, it was almost 20 years ago that We'd sequenced, what, maybe three or four genomes, quite frankly, at that time, ever in the history of humanity.

And now, probably in the course of the conversation that you and I are going to have, there's going to be 3,000 to 5,000 genome sequenced somewhere.

I mean, it's just hard to imagine that in two decades, we've gone where sequencing genomes is a moonshot.

And now, quite frankly, it costs less to sequence a genome than it does to go and buy an iPhone.

And that is a remarkable testament to to the impact and power of not only innovation, but innovation that fits a gaping hole and a need, which was to really understand the molecular biology of life.

And that's what genomics enable.

Areas where it exceeded my expectations, certainly I think from my perspective, the breadth of impact it has had not only on clinical diagnostics, as you've talked about it, but expanding it to other areas that have ultimately affected and shaped therapeutic development.

If I think about things like vaccines, mRNA vaccines, COVID vaccines, all of those types of technologies, to a large extent, I think benefited from the availability of genomics and sequencing.

as a tool.

And more broadly speaking, if you sort of expand that out and look at, you know, just about any area of therapy development today, I would say genomics has and will continue to play a pretty critical role.

I think where I wouldn't necessarily say it's fallen short, but I think, you know, what it has probably highlighted and crystallized for me over the course of, in particular, probably the last five or six years is that as incredibly powerful as genomic has been and will continue to be, it only allows us to access a part of biology, albeit a very necessary part of biology.

But it is entirely insufficient to be able to allow us to understand the ideology of disease to the level that we can actually actively impact it in ways that allow us to be able to advance human health, I think, according to our ambitions.

So As incredibly powerful as it has been, I think what's clear to me, and this is really in some ways what went behind the founding of Selenome, was that we need more.

We need broader insights.

We need deeper insights.

We need more multimodal insights into how biology operates at its most fundamental level, which are the cells.

But, you know, to be quite frank, the only reason we get to actually have the opportunity to contemplate those questions is because genomics has allowed us to be able to even ponder and be ambitious enough to take them off.