The 30 young leaders who are forging a new future for the healthcare industry in 2023

Insider set out to identify a new generation of leaders, including entrepreneurs, researchers, and clinicians, from startups, nonprofits, and major companies who are transforming the healthcare industry.  From hundreds of nominations, Insider selected 30 leaders under 40 who are developing new ways to treat diseases and help people stay healthy. As one of this year’s selected leaders, Verge’s CEO and founder, Alice Zhang, talks about how Verge is using AI and human data to identify potential treatments for diseases more quickly. Read the excerpt below, and head over to Insider to see their full list: https://bit.ly/3qJj0cm.

Alice Zhang, 34, is using AI and human data to come up with treatments for diseases more quickly.

By Josée Rose, Insider

Zhang is at the forefront of the biotech industry as the CEO and a co-founder of Verge Genomics, working on drugs for diseases that don't have good treatments, particularly ALS, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's.

She's worked with machine learning and computational biology since her Ph.D. days and thought even then that "it's kind of crazy that people are still using things like mice to try to predict what will work in humans."

It's not a crazy concept — using human data instead of animal models to identify effective human drugs. With AI advances across science and engineering, there's "potential to totally revolutionize how we discover drugs," she said.

One way is through cutting the time it takes to develop certain drugs, which can take 10 years or more. Verge targeted and developed a potential ALS drug and is now testing it in people, all in the span of four years. The company has raised more than $134 million in funding.

"You can have as much data as you want and the fanciest algorithms but you're still not going to be able to predict something that actually works in humans," she said.

That's why Verge works with data derived from brains and spinal cords donated by people after they die. By generating the right clinical data, Zhang said they can feed it back into the company's AI to train and improve it.

Beyond drugs, Zhang focuses on people and wants to show "there's a new way that people can work together that doesn't need to be ego-driven, that doesn't need to be fear-driven." She welcomes emotions in science because "emotions have a huge amount of data," and it's important to bring that to the table.