From Lab to Launch Podcast: “The proof is in the protein”

“In my former role at McKinsey & Company, my job was to help investors that were looking at pharma services organizations that were helping pharmaceutical companies to accelerate the therapies they were developing, and to look more deeply at how patients could benefit from them. And so I got very deep into looking at companies that were doing unique things, and then looking at how those companies could continue to evolve in this culture of innovation that we have right now with AI, data, and multi-omics approaches permeating many aspects of pharmaceutical development.

Sapient came across my radar as a company that was moving quickly and doing some really unique things in shifting the entire field beyond genomics. Now of course genomics has been amazing, and has produced so much knowledge of human disease and human health. But, genomics is really an indirect way of looking at disease. You’re looking at just a very little bit of information, DNA only. And when you’re looking at genetic information broadly across a lot of patients, to get that statistical power to notice something that could really impact a patient and change their disease state, you need a lot of patience. The contribution of each genetic difference is relatively small, and so that’s why you need a really large sample size.

Now, with things like RNA seq, which is still genomics, I think you’re getting closer to disease causality, at least you can see the messenger RNA to know that the the DNA and the particular gene is expressed. But proteins are where the action is. That’s really true in a quite literal sense. The proteins in a cell are what catalyze reactions, and those reactions just don’t happen if the proteins aren’t present. And then you can pick up the other side of the reaction through metabolites that are often secreted into the blood.

So, to understand a disease and a patient’s response to therapy, DNA and RNA only take you so far. You really have to move beyond those technologies to next generation multi-omics approaches that enable you to look directly at proteins and metabolites. That is what we do at Sapient. We do multi-omics at scale, and we’re able to look at thousands of different proteins or metabolites simultaneously in a patient sample. What this does is it enables us to observe things about a disease or a therapeutic with much fewer patients but with much more detail.”