SAN FRANCISCO & BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Foresite Labs, LLC, an entity that incubates transformative companies at the interface of data science and healthcare, today announced its public launch. The new firm is led by Foresite Capital Managing Director Dr. Vik Bajaj. Foresite Labs unites experienced data scientists, statistical geneticists, clinicians, biostatisticians, and engineers in supporting and creating early-stage healthcare companies.
As a laboratory for company formation, Foresite Labs employs the tools of data science -- industrialized measurement, understanding, and experiment -- to help solve problems in the life sciences and healthcare. Foresite Labs-incubated companies will benefit from a data platform consisting of integrated large public and proprietary data sets. The analysis platform also includes mature and scalable tools from the world of statistical genetics and causal inference that enable large-scale analyses of primary human biological and clinical data, and robust implementations of emerging methods based on machine learning and artificial intelligence. The Labs experimental platform is tightly integrated with its analysis platform and relies heavily on high-throughput biological and chemical approaches and clinical assessments. Finally, all companies benefit from the scientific, technical, and business leadership of an experienced team.
“Our understanding of human disease has been transformed by large scale population studies that probe the genetic basis of human biology by observing the experiments of nature,” said Dr. Vik Bajaj. “Techniques from the world of functional genomics together with advances in computational biology and machine learning will allow Foresite Labs to connect work in the laboratory to observations in the clinic in unprecedented ways.”
Prior to Foresite Capital, co-founder Dr. Bajaj was the chief scientific officer of GRAIL and the co-founder and former chief scientific officer of Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences). Senior management of Foresite Labs includes Dr. Alex Blocker, Head of Data Science (formerly of GRAIL and Verily), Dr. Rick Dewey, Head of Genomics Discovery (formerly of the Regeneron Genetics Center), Dr. Damien Soghoian, Head of Operations and Strategy (formerly of Verily), Dr. Paul da Silva Jardine, Head of Drug Discovery (formerly of Pfizer), and Cindy Mesaros, Head of Brand and People. The Foresite Labs Scientific Advisory Board includes, among others:
- Mathai Mammen, Global Head of R&D, Jannsen Pharmaceuticals, J&J
- Paola Arlotta, Chair, Harvard Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology
- Euan Ashley, Director, Center for Inherited Cardiovascular Disease and Clinical Genomics Program; Co-Director, Stanford Data Science Initiative
- Calum MacRae, Vice Chair, Scientific Innovation at the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital
- Steve Finkbeiner, Director, Taube/Koret Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research at Gladstone; Investigator, Roddenberry Stem Cell Center
- Alex Aravanis, Chief Scientific Officer, Head of R&D, and Co-Founder at GRAIL
- Ruslan Medzhitov, Sterling Professor of Immunobiology; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Jennifer Listgarten, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley; Chan Zuckerberg Investigator
- Jeff Huber, Vice-Chair, GRAIL (founding CEO of GRAIL, formerly SVP of Google and board member of Illumina)
“We are on the cusp of a transformation in healthcare. At the end of that transformation will be a modern healthcare system that efficiently serves the interests of the healthcare consumer,” said Jim Tananbaum, CEO of Foresite Capital and co-founder of Foresite Labs. “We believe that to accelerate this transformation we need to make it easier for visionary entrepreneurs to accomplish great things. That is our goal with Foresite Labs.”
About Foresite Labs
Foresite Labs supports the next generation of healthcare entrepreneurs who will create innovative companies that transform the way that we discover and develop new medicines, and the way that we deliver care to patients in need. Foresite Labs systematically uses the tools of data science to create companies in healthcare that connect true changes in patient outcomes to all of the activities that are needed to develop, design and deploy therapeutics. For more information about Foresite Labs, please visit www.foresitelabs.com.
