Podcast | March 19, 2025
The Future of Pharma Podcast: On Opening the Aperture in Biomarker Discovery
“I liken biomarker discovery to astronomy. With the naked eye you can only see so many stars, so if you’re just looking up at the night sky, those are the stars you record and follow every day. But with a very powerful telescope, now you can see thousands upon billions of additional stars. And so your ability to understand and catalog the night sky is so much greater… and biomarkers are no different.
Our technologies are the telescope to help us find more useful biomarkers. They enable us to measure thousands upon thousands more molecules in humans than we could just several years ago. And so that becomes transformative for not only the practice of medicine, but also for drug development.”
Listen to the full conversation between Sapient’s Dr. Mo Jain and The Future of Pharma host Samir Gondalia as they discuss advances in biomarker discovery, which enable broader and deeper probing of human biology, and how these innovations are accelerating precision drug development and targeted therapies.
This wide-ranging yet focused interview delves into topics including:
- Biomarker-driven changes in disease classification over last 20 years
- The evolving role of biomarkers as predictors for clinical trial success
- The need to expand biomarker-guided drug development with faster discovery of novel markers across more diseases and patients
- Next-generation technologies, including discovery mass spectrometry, that are opening the aperture in terms of the biology we can explore
A key theme that emerged from the conversation is that precision medicine is not necessarily about understanding each individual, but understanding their disease state. Drugs fundamentally target the mechanism by which an individual goes from a normal state to an abnormal state, and leveraging biomarker discovery to reveal those different mechanisms or “paths” by which a subpopulation goes from a normal to disease state is key to precision-guided therapeutics.
Listen above or by searching “The Future of Pharma” on your favorite podcast platform!
