Care Plan x NIA Accelerator: Dr. Blake & the Future of Dementia at Alstara

Episode Transcript:

Almost. Hello and good morning, everybody, and welcome back to The Care Plan. This is actually a pretty special episode as it's a part of a mini series that I'm going to be doing with some of the amazing finalists and maybe some other surprise guests from the National Institute on Aging Startup Challenge, which brings together some of the most exciting new ideas in aging and health care. So today I'm super thrilled to be chatting with Dr. Lauren Blake, co-founder of All Star, about how she and her team are using AI to change the way we discover new drugs for Alzheimer's and beyond. Hey, how are you doing today? Good, thanks. Thanks so much for being here. Super excited for this episode and to just chat a little bit. Absolutely. It's going to be super fun and exciting. Well, y'all already know how it goes. We're going to go ahead and get right into it with our rapid fire questions. So, Dr. Blake, if you could go back to your first day in the lab, what advice would you give yourself about building a biotech startup? Sometimes life surprises you. I started doing research in the lab at fourteen, started working at WPI in Worcester at sixteen. And so I didn't even know what a biotech startup was. Never mind that I would help to build one. Well, there you go. That's awesome. So you tell yourself, hey, you're going to do some big things out there. More like just enjoy the ride and the opportunities and mentors that come into your life. That's really cool. I love it. I love it. All right. Now tell me about one discovery or insight that completely changed about how you think about drug development. Absolutely. I think when we're when we're in the lab, we're thinking about pipetting, we're on the computers. And for me, what really changed for me is thinking about the importance of the patient journey from their symptoms to their treatment, to how they access care. If we build the world's most effective medicine, but no one can access it, did we really build the best medicine possible? That should be the title of this podcast. That was really, really good. I love it. All right. Now, Tell me about the most unusual place you've ever had a scientific idea. This question makes me laugh. Really nothing too unusual, but I love to go on walks and hikes in order to get unstuck and kind of mull through my ideas and then usually come up with a solution. I love it. I love it. I feel like for me, I have my most random ideas in the shower, especially at night. Not morning showers, but evening showers exclusively. I was going to go with shower and then I was like, well, we're live, then we push the line. So I'm going to go with walks. All right. Now this one might be a little controversial, but AI and drug discovery, is it overhyped, underrated, or exactly where it should be? Entirely dependent on how it's being used and what question you're trying to answer. All right, keeping it diplomatic. I love it. I love it. And my last one for you. Not just a flag, but I think we're going to get into a little bit about how we're thinking about using AI at Astara. I'm really happy and excited to share that and continue to develop it. And so I think for us, it's not just the diplomatic answer, but we put really a lot of thought into how we're using it. It's not just LLMs take the wheel. That's amazing. And I think one of my favorite topics to ever discuss is just use cases for AI that you wouldn't think of immediately right off the bat. So I really do love what you guys are doing. And this one's just a little fun one. So if All-Star were a fictional character or superhero, what would its superpower be? Predicting the future. We're trying to predict the medicines of the future. I love it. That's awesome. That's a pretty good superpower. I feel like if I had to choose one, it would either be that or teleportation. Ooh. good. I just, I'm not exactly sure how that would, how that would help us make better drugs, but maybe like the physics of it or something would help us learn about molecules better. Maybe. Yeah. Just, just, just for me personally, I feel like if I could just be like, Oh, I'm in Hawaii, just, just walking on the beach. All right. Now I'm back in the office and we're good. Head cleared. And we got new ideas cooking on the way. Oh, I like it. Okay. so i think me and probably most of our audience is really um curious to know what the sort of aha moment was that led you to start this company absolutely for me it was really seeing the contrast in the standard of care for fields like oncology versus aiding aging related and particularly brain diseases like alzheimer's disease so for example um when i was growing up I actually had a friend pass away from childhood leukemia. And that had not just a deep impact, I think, on this deep-seated commitment to health and continuing to develop treatments, but if she had been born today with the medicines and the advancements that have been made in oncology, then she would be alive today and have a much higher probability of living a long, healthy, and happy life. And so I really see so much, and I'm so inspired by my colleagues in oncology who have really made it to their mission to develop these just amazing drugs and drug combinations and therapeutic regimens. that help patients. And so for me, it was really about drawing a line in the sand of, okay, how can we bring some of those outcomes and insights that have led to those great outcomes into fields that been a little bit neglected, that it's been a little bit harder to get traction in that are really, really challenging. Absolutely. take out your checkbook, start writing the checks because that that's pretty awesome. Like, I think that that is a really beautiful sort of like, first of all, mission and like reason to start something. And I never really thought about like how bittersweet innovation is because there's, you know, it's of course like heartbreaking to know that this hasn't been around for, the other humans that have existed and other people have had to suffer the consequences of different diseases and chronic illnesses. But that's the sweet part of innovation is that we're going to continue to get better at this and medicine is going to continue to advance. That's, that's really, really, it's really wonderful. Um, but yeah, speaking of, I think the name All Star is really awesome. Is there like a story behind it that captures what the platform does or how did you come up with that? I know everyone always asks us about Karyaya and I love telling that story. So I figured I'd ask you too. Absolutely. I think we, for, for us, the, um, area of the projects that we can work on is much like the constellations are very broad. But we're also much like constellations are trying to make connections between between different stars or between different drugs and diseases and in order to best identify the most safe and effective drugs for for Alzheimer's disease and related symptoms. And so we're So for us, it was really about, hey, this is a big problem, much like a big sky. But actually, we can start to see those connections between the stars. Lauren, I've known you for a while and I had no idea. That is so cool. I love that. So the AL stands for Alzheimer's? Yeah. Or like the... Sure, let's go with that. Let's go with that. We were coming up with it more from the star part. And then sort of some off the record advice is if you are... if you have a name that in alphabetical that is in alphabetical order a lot of lists and a lot of like website lists will go in alphabetical order and so being towards the top can be very very helpful so we need we wanted that yeah so one of that's the star concept but then also the the a There you go. I love that, yeah, because we're working on Alzheimer's disease. Yeah, that's where my mind immediately went to. I was like, first of all, it's like all, as in Alzheimer's, and then, ah, it's beautiful. I love it. That's so great. So, you know, getting to a little bit more of like the nitty gritty and like the actual science and the AI in action. You work with these like huge biological data sets, sometimes called like omics data. I hope I'm saying that correctly. But so can you walk us through like a moment when the data actually surprised you or maybe pointed you to a new therapeutic idea or maybe just like walk us through how you use this data on a day to day basis? Yeah, absolutely. And kind of referring back to some of the innovation that's happened over our lifetimes and even in our career. I mean, part of the one of the times when I really, really fell in love with with human genetics and computational human genetics data has been the use of PCSK nine. So that's a genetic mutation that helped us to under sorry, genetic mutations within that gene. actually helped us to better understand heart disease and ultimately helped us to create this whole new class of cholesterol lowering drugs. And so this discovery, I think, shows how powerful genetic and genomic data can be to really point us towards the biology that matters for patients. And we're actually living in an amazing time, not just with the innovation and AI and computing, but also in the past ten years, there's been just massive collaborative efforts to collect this omics data. So whether that be genetics, genomics or gene expression, proteomics data, which is really exciting. But and so now we have so much of this data collected and stored and being really ready to be mined. And we're really just scratching the surface of how we work with it. And so if you had told me that, hey, you're going to have access. Ten years ago, if you'd said you're going to have access to five hundred thousand patients or. just genetics from five thousand five hundred thousand people and you're going to get that for less than ten grand. I would have said no way. But now that's reality. That's just baseline. That's that's literally a dream come true, huh? For me, I mean, absolutely. I mean, my initial studies when I was doing work in undergrad, it was actually using census data to understand like proxy or using that as a genetics for proxy or proxy for genetics. And I thought, I don't know, a couple thousand people, like that was a lot. And so for me to not only have that, again, I was using it as proxy. I didn't even have the genetic samples. And so now to see that I have access to so many different people and patients, I'm very bullish on the next ten years. That's amazing. It's only up from here. I feel like the growth is exponential, not even linear. We are moving at such an incredible pace. And that's why I like having conversations like this, because there's things going on behind closed doors that maybe average joe walking the streets isn't necessarily going to know about so it's really great to learn and hear that so many of these advances are going on and it's really cool and for those of us at home dr blake does have um her background is in genetics right correct yeah that's what she got her phd in so that's um a little a bit of a tidbit right there so Going back into the AI part of it a little bit, and for me at least, AI can feel a little bit abstract sometimes. But I guess you kind of talked about this with how big the data sets are right now. But is there another example where you felt like the AI helped uncover something that you wouldn't have been able to see otherwise? Absolutely. I think very broadly, AI really helps us to organize the data and really, really process it, but and also find really interesting relationships between drugs and diseases that necessary that that if you were to to look at it, let's say visually, it would be very hard to see because of so many of these relationships are so nuanced, but make such an impact. And so we're again, we're really lucky that that we have these tools, that we not only have the data, but we also have the tools to be able to analyze and and distinguish these patterns. and i don't think um just because you know there's only so many people on our team there our eyes can only look at so much um and can can that um i think we get tired whereas ai never gets tired it will keep digging and digging and digging and working um and so so i don't think that we would find and we would have found these patterns with that The thing that I love when AI enhances the human brain rather than replaces it, when it's used in conjunction with and allows for processes to be sped up and for us to be able to focus on something else while something that's maybe a little bit, quote unquote, more tedious is being done by the AI. So love to hear that. So many of us know And you probably know this too, working with them. Neurocognitive diseases are pretty tough to tackle. So maybe to flip it on the more happy side, what's been one of the most exciting or unexpected breakthroughs that you've had in your career and your work so far? Yeah, for us, it's really been figuring out how to actually wrangle stress all of this data that is available. What's so interesting is that on the surface, all of this data is public. And so a lot of times when I'll talk to folks, particularly folks outside of biology, they'll say, well, it's public, so can't you just use it? Just throw it into the AI and get something out? And just because, and I spend a lot of time explaining, just because it's public does not mean that it's usable. And it's available, but it's not usable. And so here at Elstara, we've put a ton of work, both human hours and really deep thinking, but also algorithmically with AI in order to gather, organize, harmonize, and standardize a lot of this data. And I tell folks on my team all the time, I did it this morning in a team meeting that we have, that this effort is very hard. And it is very detailed. And quite frankly, it is not glamorous. People think, oh, again, the data is out there and it's available, so just put it into the model. It'll be fine. But... And because I think it's not glamorous, really no other pharma company is doing exactly what we're doing on the data front. But at the same time, because we're putting in this effort now, it is helping to enable some therapeutics related discovery that we wouldn't have had without all that work upfront and filling in the gaps and putting things together and making sure all the names are correct. So again, I'm so fortunate that my team has really embraced this challenge because it hasn't been done before, but I think that it's really going to help with understanding, again, these relationships between drugs and diseases and ultimately taking those learnings and helping us in order to develop better therapies for neurocognitive diseases. Absolutely. Wow. You answer that so well. I really, really love it. And just having met you and your team, there couldn't be a better group of people kind of collaborating on this and working together. And you know what? I can't wait to rerecord this podcast five years down the road and see all the amazing advancements that you guys have made. So You know, Dr. Blake, we have a lot of students who are on our platform, you know, who are interested in careers and research, health care, medicine, just things that are, you know, within the health sector. And you've kind of like bopped around a little bit in this sector, too. And you've transitioned, I think, really impressively from research to startup leadership. So I guess maybe a piece of advice for the eighteen to twenty two year old listening at home, what's been the most memorable challenge or learning curve moment in building your startup? Absolutely. I think for me, it's really been that people management aspect and matching people to projects. There's really, to me, a fine balance between helping people to stretch and reach their potential versus just throwing them in the deep end without a life jacket. I love it. And so some of the advice that I would give when you are for your audience that's pursuing, let's say, internships is when you're interviewing them just as much as they're interviewing you. And so really understanding what is the company's philosophy about interns and how do they think about their interns development? And then also too, how do they support that? And so for example, at Ostara, we take a very graduated and scaffolded approach. So for example, our interns will start with a project that has pretty clear milestones, but also very clear steps and learning objectives. And so the goal for that is to really understand, is to... get folks comfortable and working with the technology, setting up a lot of time for learning. So a lot of times we have folks that are coming from the data science and AI space that don't necessarily know about as much about the biology or like all mixed data side of things. And that really gives them that that kind of structured project really gives them also an opportunity to learn and see where some of their gaps are. But we do set that expectation early that over time, the kind of step-by-step guidance will decrease and their autonomy over the project as well as future projects is expected to to increase and so we've we've seen that work really successfully where where folks are are coming in with some structure and now seeing some of the our interns development it's it's been really amazing that that they'll come and tell me like hey i think after again three, six months of this approach of this of this approach and kind of learning to me and saying, hey, I'm noticing this. I love it. That's that's so amazing. You know, the thing and I think that that transition to adulthood a lot of the times is not really even talked about because you spend your whole life like And then undergrad and then, you know, grad school being told what to do, sort of being told, like, here's the rubric. Here is what you're expected to do. And this is what the result is supposed to look like. And I'm going to give you a grade on that and tell you how that is. Whereas in the real world, I feel like a lot of the times we don't take that into consideration. And that means we don't necessarily we're not going to play to our people's strengths. So maybe someone is really great at taking direction and advice and needs that hand holding at the beginning and needs to sort of be given those steps in order to thrive and excel. And maybe three years down the road, they're going to be writing the rubrics and the plan and the things for the incoming interns. And then someone else may come in and like within a week, they're like, I got this. I am noticing X, Y, and Z. And so that's, I really love that you said that because a lot of times one of like our interview questions is also like, what motivates you? Like, why are you doing this? Like, what is the reason for this? And then kind of just like getting to where people are at in that level, I feel like really differentiates a true leader. And just, it's great to see that, you know, you guys are kind of embodying that, over there, too. We're doing the best that we can. We're definitely not always, you know, not always perfect. But I also think, too, a willingness to to talk about your mistakes or things that you are wrong about. I mean, there will be times where I'll be pretty that I will Talk to my co-founder if there was an issue or I said something that maybe wasn't correct or didn't have the best suggestion. But I also do try to make it a point occasionally in team meetings to say, like, I was wrong. And here's how, you know, here's how we're going to fix it. Or this is like, I don't have all the, yeah, I don't have all the answers. If I did, trust me, we would be cranking even faster on making great medicines. That's amazing too, because it also allows people to also own up their mistakes and like, it's okay to make these mistakes as long as, you know, it's, you're going to just get back up the next day and try again. Absolutely. And I would and I actually had a conversation with an intern recently about this of I would so much rather that you try, you try something and honestly have it be wrong, have it be completely wrong. But your thought process was there as opposed to just, oh, my gosh, I don't know what to do. But on the flip side of that, for leaders, that also means that if you say, hey, if you make a mistake, it's okay. You then can't come back and yell at them when they try something and it doesn't work. That's amazing. I mean, that's literally like exactly how it should be and how I just love it. I feel like I'm like, did you and Neil have a conversation? I feel like we talked about this a couple of days ago. I don't think I was a fly on the wall for that. However, Neil and I did really click when we first met, when we were at the NIA bootcamp in Philadelphia. I think we share some similar values on particularly on family and also commitment to patients. But I also, it sounds like we may have something in common when we think about company and people development. Well, speaking of the NIA Bootcamp and the Startup Challenge as a whole, how has participating in this accelerator shaped the way that you think about taking science from the lab to the real world and creating that impact? Absolutely. The NIA Startup Challenge has been absolutely transformative. for Elstara, one of the things that I love about the challenge is that it forces us to really dig deep into the commercial aspects. And we've just had so many lessons and resources from the Science Center and also from the NIA around customer discovery and really thinking about the value that one's company can provide in the marketplace and how you're going to get there. In particular, I'd love to give a huge shout out to our NIA challenge mentor, Dr. Charles Mobs, who's been really influential in the development of our business model. Oh, that's so sweet. I love that. I'm really glad that you're, you know, having as great and important of an experience as we are, because truly, it's such an important program. And I feel like, you know, for again, those of you who also may not know, the NIA is a part of the NIH, National Institute in Health, and they are, you know, this wonderful agency that is focused on aging and our aging population and has been such a wonderful partner to startups and founders like us. And of course, Alstara as well. And again, huge shout outs all the way around. I completely ditto all of your sentiments and the resource has truly, truly been wonderful. But yeah, I guess maybe looking forward, say fast forward five years from now um what do you hope people will say about what astara has achieved Absolutely. I think similar to many other therapeutics startups, I hope people say that we're really on the course of changing patients' lives with our therapies. But even more important to me is that anyone who does work with us or for us says that we're technically strong, we're smart people who are also very collaborative individuals. and kind. And overall, I just want All Star to be the type of company that people love working for and building medicines at. I love that. That's great. You should put that on your, if it's not already, you should put that on your mission statement because that's really amazing and inspiring. And maybe if you could, for our audience at home, just maybe explain what therapeutics really means. I mean, the way that we're thinking about it is really the development of drugs in order to help with treat a patient's disease. I don't know if there was something specific that you had in mind. I genuinely, when I started the challenge, I didn't know what that meant. And I was like, oh, therapeutics, cool. It's like physical therapy or occupational therapy and things like that. And it's not quite, I mean, it can be, but way broader than that. So I felt like it might be a helpful little add. Yeah. The treatment of disease aspect of it that is a really really helpful definition and then you can sort of dig in i think a lot of the the therapeutics companies um let's say at the through the through the nia challenge are very like molecule and drug focused yes but there's definitely a lot of other solutions that can be helpful I love it. And we kind of talked about this a little bit about advice for internships and things like that for students or early career scientists. But for those who are dreaming of entrepreneurship and wanting to become founders themselves, is there a mindset shift or a habit that you've personally developed that you think makes a big difference in the way that you are leading at your company and being an entrepreneur? Yeah, absolutely. And this is something that I'm certainly not perfect at, still working on. But I think knowing when to focus versus when to be flexible, curious, and exploratory is really a skill. So for example, there's times where you've got to just sit down, butts in seats, and focus, right? working on your undergrad thesis and sort of other those big deadlines and milestones, big analysis that you need to complete in order to meet a milestone for a grant or for a contract. But I think there are lots of other times where learning things maybe in other, not just in other biological science topics, but really much broadly can be helpful. So for entrepreneurship, I mean, business development, cybersecurity, accounting, you don't have to be an expert in those, but understanding enough know understanding a little bit and and also ideally having friends who are very good at those topics um very very very helpful um and so just just thinking about my my own career i mean i had a lot of uh roles that were analyst roles and so right that's um but when you're when you're at a startup there's so much to do that if you are getting your own analyst work done and hey the operations person who sits next to you and you have coffee with every day is completely overwhelmed and needs help with some contracts, then sometimes volunteering, again, get your regular work done, but volunteering for that can be Very helpful. And again, working at different startups and different companies, I feel like I was able to see a lot and do a lot, including writing proposals and reviewing contracts. And I'll let your audience guess what I spend a lot of time doing now at Ostara. I think that that's really... Being a founder sometimes does mean, you know, being sort of a jack of all trades at times and, you know, putting on different hats, no matter if you've got to. You know nothing about what putting that hat on means and you just got to learn, learn, learn right on the spot. So that's something that's definitely, you know, I feel like. I feel like. it's tough to kind of like grab, grasp your head around at first because, you know, their whole saying goes, Jack of all trades, master of none. But that doesn't necessarily have to be the case at all times, because sometimes truly being in a startup environment means just being flexible and doing what is necessary to be done. And I feel like once you and your team are fully in that mindset, that's when the magic really starts to happen. Absolutely. Everyone's on the boat rowing in the same direction at the same speed. Now, we do have an audience question that was already answered, but just because it was my favorite question. And I ask you to answer it again. So the question is, how did you come up with the name all star for your startup? Absolutely. And we're gonna get I think we're gonna get a little bit of revisionist history here. Because with with Nirvana's suggestion about the the AL for for Alzheimer's and, and not just trying to be top of mind by starting with a I love, love that part. But then and then also, We really sought a lot of inspiration with the star part, really sought a lot of inspiration from looking at going outside with our kids and looking up at the sky and seeing just how broad that is. But then also when you start to look at specific stars and you can see relationships through constellations, and we're hoping to see disease and drug relationships in a similar way in order to continue to develop therapeutics for neurocognitive diseases. Absolutely. And that is so beautiful and said so incredibly. When you become a billion dollar company, I expect a small shout out. Sounds good. Plus, five years from now, doing this podcast again. There you go. Heck yeah. It's in my calendar. September the sixth, twenty thirty. All right. It's we're going to do it. But Dr. Blake, it was such a pleasure speaking with you today and learning more about all the wonderful advancements that you're making. And I actually can't wait to see you in three short weeks in Las Vegas at the health conference. Absolutely. Super exciting to see you, your co-founders, and see how awesome your booth is going to be. Oh, yeah. We can't wait. And for anyone else who's listening in the audience that's going to be at Health, Dr. Blake and myself and a whole group of other wonderful founders, at the NIA booth exhibiting our product and would love to say hi to you and get the chance to get to know you better. As always, thanks so much everyone for being here and I hope you have a lovely, lovely start to the weekend. Bye guys. Thanks so much. Have a great rest of the day.