Professor Miriam Merad on precision medicine and Owkin’s unprecedented connections

We recently visited Professor Merad to learn more about her work at the cutting-edge of precision medicine. In this interview, she shares how pharma, biotech and academia are coming together to realise the long-awaited potential of precision medicine – and how Owkin is helping to improve treatment and transform the way we diagnose disease. We also discussed the unprecedented connections that Owkin is creating across the healthcare research ecosystem.

Professor Miriam Merad summarized her thinking around three themes:

Using more precise diagnosis to match the right patient with the right treatment

Precision medicine is about changing the way we diagnose. We will never call a cancer ‘lung cancer’ again, we will call it by Its molecular type. There are two aspects to precision medicine:  a diagnostic aspect where you can refine the diagnostics and there is an aspect of identifying the right treatment for the right biology.

AI’s growing role in research

Owkin is making the bet that we can use artificial intelligence and advances in computational biology to transform the way we diagnose disease and identify new drug targets.

Tighter collaboration between biotech, pharma and academic centers

The ecosystem of research is an extraordinary one. Academic centers have a major role to play: this is where patients are being treated, this is where there’s total freedom to discover. Biotech companies are those companies where most innovation is going to happen. Pharma scales those discoveries made in biotech and academic centers.