At this year’s ON Helix event ‘New Horizons for BIO Innovation’, a key note session expertly moderated by Precision Life’s Rowan Gardner, covered the ins and outs, or ones and zeros, of Tech-Bio. But first, have you protected all your valuable digital data from exfiltration? Is your cybersecurity up to snuff? A hostile attack leading to extortion and worse, can be just one click anyway, as data security expert Naveen Kaushik from ZenZero demonstrated. In May, United Health confirmed the company paid hackers a $22m ransom, which led to questioning of the CEO by US Senators.

Assuming you have your data secure, and constantly curated, which Susana Tomasio at CDD Vault can help you with, what can you do with it to crystallise value in a health care setting? Carina Kern at LinkGevity set out how the company, which is redefining our most basic understanding of the ageing process, has its sights firmly set on using data to make a difference in kidney disease, which has accelerated at an alarming rate: up 200% in 30 years. The company has used a novel tech-bio lens for drug repurposing, using an AI-based biological data crunching approach, to find a new class of drug which blocks cell necrosis, in a fraction of the time and budget typically required by experienced drug hunters. Blocking cell necrosis has wider applications in increasing an individual’s health span, in areas including tissue engineering, and organ preservation, where innovation is desperately needed, as most patients die waiting for organs, and barely any organs that are harvested are used.

AI can be fundamental in drug repurposing and was used during the pandemic to identify cancer drugs that could be used to treat covid. For marketed drugs there is a wealth of available data that an AI can be tasked with sifting through faster than the eye can follow.

At Nuclera, Cam Watson outlined how they have identified that a major bottleneck in drug development is making enough of a protein to start a project, and transition from a tech-bio digital enabled identification of targets approach to a bio-tech based real world experimental framework. Quick, accurate, production of tiny amounts of protein can provide enough material to explore the biology of a protein suggested by tech-bio as a therapy, with the data generated enabling additional iteration cycles on the path to develop something fit for clinic.

A drug development mantra is to begin with the end in mind. With tech-bio, keep in mind there are powerful players that influence the end game. Especially those who determine reimbursement for a new medicine. Have you factored in the sort of data payors will need to see to say yes and enable patient access to your innovation? Get that right, and with solid data at its core, it’s time for tech-bio to soar!

Keynote presentation: Empowering FAIR Data Practices with CDD Vault: Bridging Automation and Digitalisation in Research – Susana Tomasio, Collaborative Drug Discovery (photo by Simon Callaghan)