Trends from the Trenches

A cure can be real and still feel out of reach. Trends from the Trenches host Allison Proffitt is joined by Kevin Davies, executive editor of The CRISPR Journal and author of Curved Air: A Biography of Sickle Cell Anemia and the Quest to Cure the First Molecular Disease. Kevin shares how sickle cell disease became both a landmark genetics story and a test of whether medicine can treat patients with dignity. He follows Victoria Gray’s CRISPR gene therapy success while facing the discrimination, underfunding, and access barriers that still shape sickle cell care. • Why Curved Air centers sickle cell warriors as the lead characters • Why gene therapy success does not erase racism and bias in emergency care • Stories of mistreatment during pain crises and the cost of lost trust • How sickle cell spread globally through malaria selection and migration • Why the first molecular disease took decades to reach curative treatment • Funding gaps compared with cystic fibrosis and what that changes • How hydroxyurea helps and why better everyday treatments still matter • What Casgevy demands from patients and why durability monitoring continues • Why affordability and infrastructure limit global access in Africa and India • What could come next with in vivo editing and small molecule BCL11A ideas LINKS https://www.bio-itworld.com/ https://www.bio-itworldexpo.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/bio-it-world https://twitter.com/bioitworld Host Links Allison Proffitt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allison-proffitt-02138222 Guest Links Kevin Davies LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevindaviesphd/ Curved Air (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/Curved-Air-Biography-Molecular-Disease/dp/0674293967 Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders. 

Trends from the Trenches host Eleanor Howe sits down with computational biologist Eric Schadt—now an AI Scholar in Residence at Pfizer—who has spent 25 years pushing a simple idea with huge consequences: disease is a network property, not a single-gene problem. That mindset changes what “precision medicine” should mean, shifting the goal from better labels to better treatment decisions that actually improve outcomes for real patients.  They get concrete about how the AI revolution lands inside pharma and biotech. Eric explains what Pfizer’s new AI Scholar role is meant to do, what an AI-native R&D operating model looks like, and why tightly integrated teams of a few humans plus modern foundation models can outperform the old way of working. From multimodal oncology models to reasoning-first LLMs, they talk about agentic systems that can orchestrate many specialized models, not just generate text, and why interpretability and auditable traces matter when clinical decisions are on the line.  If you care about AI in healthcare, precision medicine, clinical decision support, and the future of personalized treatment, this conversation will sharpen how you see the obstacles and the opportunities.  Subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review. What do you think needs to change first: policy, incentives, or technology? Bio-IT World's Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider's look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders. The hosts bring years of industry experience in science, data, and technology to conversations exploring what is driving data and discovery, and what's coming next. Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders. 

Genomics is moving fast, but how do we get biology the hardware and software it deserves? Ben Busby, NVIDIA’s global alliances manager for omics, joins host Eleanor Howe to dig into the practical crossroads of GPU computing, open-source bioinformatics, and the next wave of precision medicine. They get specific about what GPU acceleration changes in day-to-day genomics and single-cell analysis. Faster pipelines can mean lower costs, tighter iteration loops, and newly feasible questions. They also explore the hardest bottleneck—reliable longitudinal multi-omics data—and challenge a popular assumption about AI in biomedicine: bigger isn’t always better. Links from this episode:  Bio-IT World BioTeam Diamond Age Data Science NVIDIA Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders. 

AI is moving fast in life sciences, but a confident answer is not the same thing as a correct, reproducible, auditable answer. Knowledge graphs, ontologies, and FAIR data practices are the keys to bridging this gap. Knowledge3's Tom Plasterer, CEO and co-founder, and Eric Little, chief data officer, join host Allison Proffitt to discuss what it takes to turn semantics into something practical: a knowledge product mindset, modular delivery, and “semantic ops” that can better manage data systems. Their conversation challenges the hype cycle around context graphs, explains why life sciences are a natural starting point for regulated, high-stakes AI, and shows how layered models can capture the right level of context without building a giant monolith that never takes off. Links from this episode:  Bio-IT World BioTeam Bio-IT World Europe Knowledge3 Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders. 

At last month’s Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, Eleanor Howe, founder and CEO of Diamond Age Data Science, presented the Trends with the Trenches session based on gathered input from colleagues, clients, and advisors across the life sciences field. Coding agents were the central topic—how they’re speeding up software development, open source maintenance, and analysis workflows while also shifting new types of responsibility to the human reviewer. Now, “just coding” is no longer enough, and Howe provides advice for early-career scientists on how to get hired in a different environment. Plus, she covers why simulating data can backfire, why smaller purpose-built models often win, and why better data curation, active learning, ELN automation, and federation may matter more than another flashy model demo. Links from this episode:  Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Bio-IT World BioTeam Diamond Age Data Science  Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders. 

Your AI plan can’t outrun your data. Adam Marko, life science field CTO at Hammerspace, joins the podcast to unpack the problem almost every biotech, pharma, and biomedical research group runs into: unstructured data that are siloed, fragmented, and scattered across storage systems, sites, and clouds. With host Jessica StLouis, they talk through what “data orchestration” means when building an AI-ready data foundation, infrastructure constraints and the tiered storage patterns that help teams keep AI and HPC workloads moving, and why life sciences are in a uniquely tough spot. Plus, Marko shares a preview of his presentation at Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston.  If you care about faster discovery, smoother AI workflows, and fewer manual file moves, subscribe, share this with a colleague, and rate or review so more researchers can find the conversation. Links from this episode:  From Data Chaos to Discovery: Building the Data Foundation for AI-Ready Scientific Research Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Bio-IT World BioTeam Hammerspace Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders. 

AI is now good enough to change how computational biology teams actually work, but most companies are still adopting it like it’s 2023. Sonia Timberlake, R&D strategy consultant for Timberlake & Maclsaac Biopharma Consulting, speaks with host Eleanor Howe about what’s real: agentic coding, high-throughput data workflows, and the practical limits that still slow teams down. Timberlake digs into benchmarks for capabilities and end-to-end tasks, as well as multimodal chart understanding, source verification, and where human review remains non-negotiable. The conversation also explores beyond AI to what biopharma risks missing, why novel targets still matter, and where investment interest is clustering right now. Plus, tune in to get a preview of Timberlake’s workshop at Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston next month! If this helped you think more clearly about AI in drug development and computational biology, subscribe, share the show with a colleague, and leave a review so more builders can find the conversation. Links from this episode:  Workshop: AI Upskilling for Computational Biology Teams Bio-IT World BioTeam Diamond Age Data Science Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders. 

Joining Trends from the Trenches is Allissa Dillman, founder and CEO of BioData Sage, and LaFrancis Gibson, manager for health promotion at ORAU, who discuss this year’s Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Hackathon sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE) Training Center. With host Allison Proffitt, they discuss which tools and datasets from CFDE will be part of the Hackathon, who should participate, learning and collaborating beyond datasets and tools, FAIR principles in an ever-developing AI environment, and a message beyond the teams that are participating.  Links from this episode:  Bio-IT World BioTeam Bio-IT World EuropeBioData Sage ORAU Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders. 

Computing resources are no longer just pieces of tech—they're scientific instruments. Moffitt Cancer Center’s Jarett DeAngelis, director of scientific information technology, and Shane Corder, senior HPC engineer, join cohost Jessica StLouis, senior scientific consultant at BioTeam, to discuss new approaches changing access to HPC resources and how platforms like Open OnDemand are simplifying the HPC experience for those unfamiliar with the system. They also share their thoughts on the future of HPC resources, what the Moffitt Cancer Center is planning, and what they expect to see in the field in the coming years. Links from this episode:  Bio-IT World BioTeam Bio-IT World Europe Moffitt Cancer Center Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders. 

As the new year settles in, the industry is anticipating new innovative biotech and learning from past failures. John Keilty, venture partner at Third Rock Ventures, discusses the current trends he sees in biopharma investment, separating the hype from reality of AI (and if the AI bubble will eventually pop), other ventures that should be considered, and how new companies are being built today compared to past years in this episode of Trends from the Trenches. With host Eleanor Howe, founder and CEO of Diamond Age Data Science, Keilty also reflects on the biotech failures of past years and shares his thoughts on the role of computational biologists these days, as well as where bioinvesting is working and not working now. Links from this episode:   Bio-IT World BioTeam Bio-IT World Europe Diamond Age Data Science Third Rock Ventures  Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders.