Talk to Your Pharmacist Podcast: Success Occurs in the Margins with Nontargeted Discovery

“I started life as a physician and absolutely loved every minute of it, and the privilege of taking care of patients. But I struggled with fundamental questions that came up quite often: ‘Why did I get sick? Why did this happen to me?’ In medical school and beyond, you’re taught that a mechanism gives rise to disease and this answer works well on what I would say is a population scale. For example, we know tobacco smoke contributes in some way to lung cancer. But when you look on an individual scale and someone asks, ‘why did I develop lung cancer when I don’t smoke?’, and they are a young, healthy individual with no genetic predisposition in their family, it becomes a lot harder to be able to answer. And that is where my interest in science really lies, in understanding what the root causes of disease are and being able to leverage that information to diagnose disease at its earliest time point, and to be able to help develop drugs and then to implement and execute on those drugs in the most efficacious way possible in a very personalized manner.”

Sapient’s Dr. Mo Jain recently joined Dr. Hilary Blackburn on the “Talk to Your Pharmacist” podcast to share his backstory and the impetus for founding Sapient to enable nontargeted biomarker discovery across broad small molecule chemistries. They discuss why small molecule biomarkers are needed to go beyond genetics in personalizing medicine, new methods for their large-scale discovery, validation, and translation for clinical impact, and how these biomarkers are being applied to drive success in the margins of drug development today.