Abzena Report | Page 6

ABZENA
This prompted his move into the pharmaceutical industry, where he has spent the rest of his career to date. In roles across pharmaceuticals, generics and biotech, Dave has been working at the intersection of technology and healthcare for decades, helping with progressing medicines that benefit those underserved.
Now, as Abzena’ s CIO, Dave is setting the company’ s continued technological development in motion, ensuring the biopharma is data smart and delivering results for its clients and those in need.
Abzena’ s tech journey Tech and pharma’ s relationship is nothing new, but is becoming increasingly intertwined to improve patient outcomes and drug discovery.
For Dave, Abzena has never had an issue with having too little data or the right technology to undertake work – however, Abzena has been on a journey to ensure the right, actionable and relevant datasets are available to generate meaningful insights.
“ A group of scientists have done quite a lot of work with machine learning, using it to better understand key attributes like stability, screen for antibody liabilities and antibody selection,” Dave explains.“ They’ re using this technology to tell you which approach has the most probability to succeed. This cuts the whole development time of getting new therapies and medicines to patients in need sooner. It’ s our drive – and our clients’ drive – to achieve that.
“ When you get really smart people together and they solve problems, they often solve in different ways. There’ s a lot of differing cultures involved, everyone can speak up and that creates innovation. We’ re not just looking at how we have always done this, we’ re thinking about new ways to do it and how we can apply these new technologies, tapping into that innate curiosity that you have as a scientist.”
This all plays into Abzena’ s overall data strategy. With now more than a decade of operations behind the team, lots of data has accumulated.
“ I’ m not even so sure you could easily catalogue all the data we have, but that’ s one of the huge benefits of technologies
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