Blending Biology and AI: Dr. Markus Gershater on the Future of Life Sciences

Andrii: Dr. Gershater, you've got your feet in both biochemistry and synthetic biology while navigating a fast-paced tech world. In your view, what's the most exciting promise that AI holds for biotech?

Markus: The promise is that, quite simply, AI will give us insights into biology that are currently impossible and that we can’t yet begin to imagine. Also exciting, but secondary to this, is how it will prompt changes in the way we work. The reason I say this is because my underlying belief here is that, right now, AI and biological research don’t yet fit together properly.

AI is a technology that fundamentally demands change from the people who want to use it, so for AI to have a fundamental impact on biology, we really have to change the way we approach the process of science in the first place. It seems to me that organizations and teams will have to adopt new mindsets, new processes, and new tooling.

There are some companies who, today, already exhibit many of the required characteristics of companies that are looking to the future in terms of how they think about the way we gather data about biological systems. Think of companies like Recursion and Insitro, that have built whole automated platforms around this. Fully digitized, they are built to systematically create a greater understanding of biological systems.

They give us a glimpse of what the future may look like: the routine generation of high-quality, large, varied, multidimensional data, in the full context of rich metadata. Data that provides the foundation for AI, and a step change in our ability to understand and work with biological systems.