Inaugural Converge Summit presented by Biocom California: Advancing Human Health Through Life Science and Tech Collaboration

This Wednesday, more than 120 biotech and tech executives gathered in South San Francisco for our inaugural Converge Summit—highlighting our new cross-sector community advancing human health through life science and tech collaboration.

The executive-level summit featured panel sessions and fireside chats led by industry experts from Atomwise , Eli Lilly , Gilead , Iambic Therapeutics , Microsoft and many more on topics ranging from how AI is transforming healthcare and pharma to navigating emerging landscapes. “Partnerships between tech and biotech will accelerate innovation, drug discovery and healthcare solutions that ultimately lead to excellent accessibility for patients from around the world,” Biocom California CEO Joe Panetta said in the opening address.

In the morning fireside chat, Mary Rozenman , CFO & CBO of insitro shared: "Four things have brought us to this moment: vast availability of data; huge advancements in ML algorithms; widespread availability of compute power and people and their ability to deploy the tech infrastructures."

On the topic of AI, Jorge Conde , general partner at Andreessen Horowitz , said it’s a “superpower” that will pay dividends in drug discovery and development. "Anything that's hard for humans, it's easy for AI. You start to see opportunities to use AI for analyzing big data at scale.”

Sam Hawgood, chancellor of UC San Francisco , shared an example of AI’s potential in healthcare. “We take about 10,000 transfer patients a year...their electronic health record gets transferred with them. That would become the intern’s job to scrape that record—thousands of pages. We can now use AI to go into that record within a very short period of time,” he said.

In the closing keynote, Joydeep Ganguly , SVP of corporate operations & chief sustainability officer, Gilead Sciences , said using AI is top of mind for achieving the company’s ESG sustainability goals: “Now one of the questions we ask every partner is, ‘Do you have an AI strategy?’ ‘Do you have access to innovation that we can tap into quickly?’”

A panel titled “The Future of Clinical Trials: Forging New Pathways Through Regulatory” moderated by Tim Scott , president & CEO, AustinPx , discussed some challenges of innovation. “It's a 6-year regulatory journey to get something from ‘here's an idea’ to actually working and getting it through,” said Charles Fisher , founder & CEO, Unlearn.AI . “I think that for a lot of tech companies, that sounds like a long time. But in order to work in this space, this is kind of what it looks like.”

Vasudev Bailey , managing partner at Artis Ventures , noted the importance of investing in companies that are embracing new technologies to advance healthcare and treatments for patients. "Let's think about how to construct a company so that it's here to stay. The problems you're working on are really important and deserve a place to come to the finish line," he said.

Thank you to all our panelists, sponsors and attendees for making our inaugural summit a success! To keep the conversation going, join our Converge community here on LinkedIn.