Who you are defines how you build.

This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series.

Brought to you by Stanford E-Corner.

On this episode, we have Alice Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Verge Genomics.

Verge uses artificial intelligence and human genomics to transform

drug discovery for multiple diseases. Zhang has driven systems biology research at the National Cancer

Institute, Princeton University, and UCLA. Here's Alice.

I'm very excited to be here today, partly because I actually started Virtuenomics when I was a student.

So I was originally a grad student at UCLA when I first started becoming interested in the drug discovery process.

And it was in that moment I realized how broken drug discovery is right now. It's still largely a guessing game, but we're in this really

unique moment of time right now where advances in genomics and machine learning are really

poising us to rethink the way we do drug discovery and take a lot of the guesswork out of drug

discovery. And so I started Verge really with a vision of creating a scalable drug discovery

engine that could be repeated, not just for one disease, but across many different diseases.

And eventually, apply to even larger human conditions such as aging, disease prevention, and

addiction. So I want to start out with kind of why I went into the field in the first place,

which is for the patients. And at Verge, our first disease area that we focused in is in ALS.

So ALS is a rapidly degenerating disorder in which patients progressively

become paralyzed, losing their ability to walk, to eat, and eventually to breathe.

And unfortunately, because most of these patients die within three years, and under our current drug

discovery system, it takes over 15 years just to find a single new drug.

Most of these patients won't get the drugs that they need.

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