Transcript of Episode 66: Eva-Maria Hempe
Disclaimer: Transcripts may contain errors.
Grant Belgard: Welcome to The Bioinformatics CRO podcast. I’m your host, Grant Belgard. Today, we’re joined by Dr. Eva-Maria Hempe, who leads NVIDIA’s healthcare and life sciences business across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Eva-Maria, trained as a physicist, earned a Bill and Melinda Gates funded PhD in healthcare service design at Cambridge, and has since moved through roles at the NHS, Bain & Company, VMware, and the World Economic Forum before joining NVIDIA. She now guides strategy for applying accelerated computing and generative AI, think BioNeMo, Parabricks, and DGX Cloud, to genomics, drug discovery, medical imaging, and more. Eva-Maria, welcome to the show.
Eva-Maria Hempe: Hey, great to be here.
Grant Belgard: So what do you do day-to-day at NVIDIA?
Eva-Maria Hempe: I think in general, my day-to-day oscillates between two major poles, like working in the business and working on the business, or playing the short game and the long game. So on the one hand side, I am responsible for the business. And so that means we have to deliver revenue because if you don’t deliver revenue, you’re not a business, you’re a hobby. And when, on the one hand side, I have to hit a revenue number because if you don’t have a revenue, then you’re not a business. But on the other hand, NVIDIA is all about the long game. Like we are creating markets. We are building things that haven’t been built before. And so it’s really about striking this balance. And what it means, very practical, is on the one hand side, as I said, working in the business. So I have customer meetings.
Eva-Maria Hempe: I work with my team. We’re discussing strategies and tactics, like what should be our sales place? How are we going to work with startups? How are we going to work with this customer? I check out KPI if I see like, are we on track to delivering the revenues that is expected of us? I do a lot of talks and evangelizing to spread the message that NVIDIA is so much more than just GPUs that we have all this great software out there as well, which is super helpful and super valuable to our ecosystem that people can save a lot of time by building on top of what we put out there. So that’s the operational part. And then there is the working on the business. So really the more strategizing, making decisions on, should we focus on enterprises or startups? Where within healthcare should we focus?
Eva-Maria Hempe: To whom do we talk about which kind of topics? To which degree are we focusing on the sale? But where do we see new areas emerging which maybe aren’t driving a sale or even a lot of compute initially, but where we really believe that there are, A, making an impact. And then if they make an impact, eventually it will turn into revenue, which is one of the real beauties about working at NVIDIA that the company is set up in this way to build, to disrupt, to change and to, yeah, you have this luxury almost like it’s a bit crazy to call it luxury, but in a lot of businesses, it’s a luxury you don’t have to really work on your business than just working in the business.
Grant Belgard: So BioNeMo just went open source. Can you tell us about that and what pain point it solves?
Eva-Maria Hempe: Yeah, so in general, as I said before, we’re trying to do at NVIDIA, we’re trying to lift up the field. So we’re not looking for the quick buck. So that’s why we’re not looking to, we’re not gonna change the field by collecting licensed revenues on BioNeMo, but we think BioNeMo is a super interesting, super valuable tool for the community. And by putting it out there as open source, we can just make it much more available to a lot more people. And also we can increase the number of people who are contributing to it with their ideas and making it into something that is a lot more valuable to the community and more powerful and much more in line with the community. I think around the same time that we made it open source, we actually also, we changed it.
Eva-Maria Hempe: Like we turned it into, it has two pieces these days, the one is BioNeMo Framework and the other one is NIMs. So Framework is really, it’s also a collection of microservices, but it’s a collection of microservices, which you need to train and deploy models. So it has a curator and an evaluator and a guard railing part to it. And you can use all of these, you can use any of these, whatever helps you to put out models in a better way. And then we have NIMs and so NVIDIA Inference Microservices and some of them are biology specific. So we have some on folding, we’ve got some on generation, we’ve got some on docking, and you can put this together into reference workflows, which we call blueprints.
Eva-Maria Hempe: I often say it’s a bit like, if you think of a big box of Legos, it’s like the building plan, how you build the most basic thing out of them and then you can play with it and turn it into all sorts of other things. But in general, what we’re trying to do with BioNeMo is really solving the main pain points of drug discovery. So drug discovery is slow, it’s expensive and then also quite technically challenging if you want to use computer aided drug discovery. And so here we’re giving researchers tools to handle complex data, to collaborate and just in general, we wanna have an advanced biomolecular research framework out there that people can use and that they can do their best work with.
Grant Belgard: And for our listeners who aren’t already familiar with BioNeMo, can you give a quick primer on what they can do with it?
Eva-Maria Hempe: So, as I said, it is mostly about computer aided drug discovery. So one way I usually explain it, we have another framework called NeMo and that’s not by coincidence. So NeMo is all about training, deploying models that have to do with language, but by now it’s actually also multimodal and BioNeMo is that for the language of biology. So if you think about a sentence has like words and observes grammar and the same way like a molecule has atoms and observes the laws of physics and chemistry. And so that’s a bit the analogy there. And so the same way that with our language model, you might have proprietary data and you might wanna train a model on this or you might wanna fine tune a model with new data, you can do the same thing with biological data.
Eva-Maria Hempe: If you have data coming in, you can curate it and then you can also make sure, so that’s the curator part, then you can also evaluate it against certain benchmarks. So how good is my model? And then finally you can also make sure it has certain guardrails, so it doesn’t do certain things that you don’t want it to do. And so that’s, yeah, that’s in a nutshell about it. It’s about training, deploying and serving biological models for drug discovery.
Grant Belgard: So AlphaFold has made a huge splash in the structural biology world. What do you think is the next big thing that would be GPU enabled in biology?
Eva-Maria Hempe: For me, AlphaFold is really like, I’m a physicist. So I know when I did my PhD, which in my mind hasn’t been that long ago, we locked up PhD students for three years in a basement to find out the 3D structure of a protein. And now you can just do it on a computer. You can go to build.nvidia.com where we host the NIMs, I said before, and we have a model there and you could fold a protein in like a second live on your computer. And it’s just mind blowing. It even works on my phone. I’ve done it during presentations on my phone. So I’ve folded a protein on my phone within less than a second. In general, there are certain things around AlphaFold. There are certain gaps. So it has problems with dynamics. It has problems with multiple conformations. It can’t do disordered proteins.
Eva-Maria Hempe: And 60% of human proteins have at least one intrinsically disordered region. It’s also not great with protein ligand and nucleic acid interaction. So there are a whole lot of things which it cannot do. And so these are actually also the things we see in the field where a lot of work is going on. And as NVIDIA, we’re doing some research ourselves in the spirit I said before, in trying to lift up the field and trying to show what’s possible and trying to also inspire other people to go further down that path. And so we’re doing some research ourselves. We’re doing a lot of research in collaboration with all sorts of other people. Sometimes we’re open about this. Sometimes it’s not disclosed, but yeah, we’re seeing a lot of things that are going on.
Eva-Maria Hempe: And what we’re seeing in particular in terms of frontiers, I would say, are four things. So we see how do you deal with larger complexes and assemblies? How do you deal with post-translational modifications? How do you deal with dynamics, molecular dynamics? And then also how do you deal with protein design? Like how can you turn AlphaFold around? Like with AlphaFold, you have the sequence and you want to know the 3D structure. Can you have a 3D structure and figure out what is the sequence behind it? So there’s a bunch of work going on in the space and I think it’s going to be super exciting to see what will come out of that.
Grant Belgard: How do you see DGX Cloud changing the barrier to entry for academic labs?
Eva-Maria Hempe: DGX Cloud is like an interesting way, which is part of what we offer. And maybe it’s easier to understand in the greater context of what we offer. So in general, we are very much agnostic of what GPU you’re running your workloads on or what NVIDIA GPU you’re running your workloads on. And that is a huge advantage for people who are working with our software because we don’t want to lock anybody in. The only commitment you’re making is you’re going to work on GPUs, which I think is not a bad lock-in. You’re not locked in any other way, but that you’re going to be using GPUs. And those GPUs, the answer what GPUs are the right ones for you will again very much depend on your situation. Like, do you have a data center? Is your data center big enough? Has it liquid cooling?
Eva-Maria Hempe: Does it have enough electricity? Do you even want to run a data center? Or do you have big spikes where you need really high performance computing capacity in a short amount of time? And DGX Cloud is following our reference architecture. So it’s really all the different components, the GPU, CPU, networking perfectly aligned with each other. And it’s in the cloud, it’s on demand. So what we see it used quite often for is spike. And if an academic lab has that, if a lab is trying to train a huge model, it can be the right thing for the lab. And it could be a great way as well to showcase the power of it, but it’s not always the right solution. Sometimes it’s also worthwhile to build your own on-prem capacity or to go with more conventional cloud capacity.
Eva-Maria Hempe: So I think it’s an element of a larger compute discussion, but it definitely allows academic labs if they have the funding, if it’s basically baked into the grants to really get top-notch performant GPU computing on really short timescales.
Grant Belgard: And at what stages in the process does AI assist drug discovery today?
Eva-Maria Hempe: Pretty much along all of them, I think we see different levels of activity. So we see a lot of really early discoveries. So it starts with things like finding new targets, which I think is an interesting one. I think it’s one where we don’t see, I think you could see even, I would hope for even more activity. Somebody told me the other day how many people are working, how big the overlap is between working on the same targets. It’s mind blowing. And for example, what we talked before, intrinsically disordered proteins is a super interesting area to really find new targets, to be able to address parts or proteins, which so far have been undruggable.
Eva-Maria Hempe: And we’re working with a company there, they’re called Peptone, and they actually, AI supported, have found a method to figure out the structures of disordered proteins. So I think this was super exciting. So we’re starting there. And then of course, we have all the virtual screening workflows in terms of, okay, you have a target, you fold the target. Then you have something like MolMIM or like a generative model, which starting from a particular small molecule creates all sorts of variations of that small molecule. And then you take your protein and your multiple variations of small molecules you generated, and then you use another AI model, which can calculate how well they fit together. And as I said, that’s an area of active research as well.
Eva-Maria Hempe: How well can you really calculate those bindings? And again, another company we’ve worked with, they’re called Inoform. They can actually also do a, they can create models that fit into a particular, or molecules that fit into a particular cavity. So there’s a lot of interesting things around there on the real fundamental level. But then there’s even more to it. There’s, we’re trying to figure out how can we also, or companies are figuring out how can you apply AI to pre-clinic?
Eva-Maria Hempe: And then even in clinical research, or the clinical stages of drug discovery and drug development, there is still so much that can be done because so many drugs don’t necessarily fail because the biological mechanism isn’t there, but often also because you can’t recruit patients, you can’t recruit the right patient. And again, AI can actually have a huge contribution to solving these kinds of problems. And then you can go into manufacturing and selling drugs. So I always tell my clients that AI is a topic along the entire value chain. And we are seeing applications today along the entire value chain. Like every single step, there is somebody working on something and a lot of progress is being made.
Eva-Maria Hempe: You still have the whole issue that just things take a very long time because like clinical studies just take the amount of time they take. You can have a bit of time out there by doing optimized recruiting of trial participants, which is usually a pretty of a delaying factor, or you can use AI also to speed up the data analysis and regulatory writing, clinical writing, submissions processes. So there is some speed up you can do there. But I think in terms of the speed up is more happening in the earlier phases of drug discovery. And then in development, we really have more of a trying to figure out where do they work. So a lot of work I see in that area as well is around biomarkers.
Eva-Maria Hempe: Again, figuring out what works for which patients so that it feeds back into the early stages, but then also once you’re in trials, you have the right patients in your trials and you have a better chance of actually making it through phase three, doing efficacy. I said about all those different ways, how AI can help with the preclinical part. And there is actually real good data on that by now. So, and SILCO is really famous about this and they were smashing it. They had 22 developmental candidates between 2021 and 2024. And actually they were able to get on average to a developmental candidate within 13 months. So around 70 molecules synthesized per program. And the fastest was like nine months and the longest was 18 months.
Eva-Maria Hempe: And this is just like a huge, huge speed up to what you usually see, but these kinds of processes take years. Interesting, so that’s the preclinical phase where it’s really about the speed up and you can also go from target and lead identification over lead optimization in 46 days these days. So all of this is amazing. And I said before in the clinical studies, it’s then really about being better. And there was a paper which came out last year where they looked at AI discovered drugs. And for phase one, the success, probability of success was twice as high as for regular drugs. And it was still pretty bad, but it was twice as high. And then for phase two, it was in line with the averages, but for phase two, the numbers started to become quite small.
Eva-Maria Hempe: And for phase three, there wasn’t enough data. But if we assume this holds, if you assume you’re twice as successful in phase one, which is not unrealistic because phase one is all about safety and with better models, we get better idea of target effect, and then phase two and three about efficacy and a dosing on part, then this actually means we’re going from one in 10 drugs, making it to markets to two in 10 drugs. It’s still a lot, but it’s basically, it’s halving our cost per drug. And if a drug costs these days, on average $2 billion to make it to market, saving a billion dollars per drug. So this is huge. Your potential is huge, which I think is why we’re all still working on this despite all the problems we talked about of long timelines and difficulties to get funding.
Grant Belgard: Where are the biggest talent gaps in bio AI today?
Eva-Maria Hempe: I think it’s really about speaking multiple languages. And the question is also talent where? So we have and– and what keeps things from reaching or from reaching impact. So I think if you look at a lot of the biotech, tech bio, we still have the issue that the entire pharma ecosystem is set up in a particular way. Somebody said it the way, like it’s a coin flip. And we know that the coin is unfair. We know that heads gonna come with a 10% probability. Now what these companies are doing, they’re actually trying to improve the coin minting process. So by using AI, we’re trying to mint better coins. We’re trying to mint a coin, which has a 20% chance of heading up, landing heads up. But this is really hard to prove.
Eva-Maria Hempe: And the entire system, the people in the VCs, all their mindset is like a biotech investor mindset. And they’re looking for the things around a 10% coin flip probability. And it’s really hard to evaluate this. Is this really going to get us this lift up or not? And different to other areas of AI like quant trading where you have immediate feedback, you change something, okay, you’re gonna make more money. Great, let’s do more of this. Here, it’s almost the complete opposite of quant trading. You have like 10 years until you see whether it works or not. And I think that’s actually one of the biggest gaps.
Grant Belgard: Even with the 10 years, it’s small in, right? So it trickles through after 10 years.
Eva-Maria Hempe: And so, yes, I think we need to have more people who speak multiple languages of AI and of data science and of biology. But I think we’re starting to see some of that. But I think it’s really more the system as a whole and the incentives and the structures and just the fact that we’re dealing with biology, which takes 10 years to come. But I’m still optimistic.
Grant Belgard: What are your thoughts on community standards such as OpenFold and so on? Are there areas where there are glaringly obvious missing standards or areas that you think are still being held back by a lack of standards?
Eva-Maria Hempe: At NVIDIA, we are big believers in open source. So we think it’s the one way to really harness the power of community. And we are big believers in the community. NVIDIA is all about communities, about ecosystems and us doing our part to help the ecosystem develop, which is why so much of our software is actually open source because we believe in the power of this approach. And we really wanna support it to come to full fruition.
Grant Belgard: Well, it’s essential to save biotech and pharma, right? The internal rate of return on R&D has been abysmal below the cost of capital for many years now. And at last that turns up.
Eva-Maria Hempe: It’s actually interesting because of those $2 billion per drug or one and a half billion dollars per drug, only I think it’s around 300 or so are the actual cost. All the rest is the cost of the failed drugs and the cost of capital because the capital is just locked up for such a long time and you have so many failures all around. And the other thing I think, I don’t know, you’ve probably seen it, it’s called Eroom’s Law. If you take how many drugs $1 billion in research spending buys you, it’s a logarithmic downward over the last 70 years. This is not recent. This has been going on forever, but it’s just starting to get into areas where it’s just really, you just can’t continue this way. We just need a different way of doing things.
Eva-Maria Hempe: We just can’t continue spending more and more and more and getting less and less and less.
Grant Belgard: So shifting gears, let’s talk about your own journey. What pulled you from physics to health?
Eva-Maria Hempe: It was the impact. So I was sitting there in my lab. So I was doing quantum optic, which means I’m sitting in a dark lab because I was dealing with optics and lasers. So you don’t want daylight messing up your experiments. So you go in in the morning, it’s dark. You leave in the evening, it’s dark. And during the day, it’s dark. And I was just thinking to myself, what is this going to do for the world? And back then we kept saying, oh yeah, this could be used for quantum computing. But back then I was like, well, but this is going to be at least 15 years until anything useful. And I have to say, this has been more than 15 years ago by now. So I was just like, okay, is this really it? But then as with those decisions, usually two things have to come together.
Eva-Maria Hempe: And the other part, which was for the ignition to really change tack was just meeting the right person at the right time. So I met this girl and she was an electrical engineer by training. And she studied how procurement processes at the hospital affect patient safety from with this very scientific engineering frame of mind. And I just thought that it was fascinating. Like all the way I’ve been trained to think, which like I really liked the scientific method. I really liked this way of thinking, but applying it to real world problems. And that’s how I got to study healthcare service design.
Grant Belgard: Are there any insights from your PhD that you still use?
Eva-Maria Hempe: Yeah, I think it’s really that organizations are an interplay between structure and people. And that sounds very simple and very obvious, but if you’re designing an organization, you’re not actually designing an organization. You’re designing almost a scaffolding for the organization to grow around. You’re giving some structure, but an organization isn’t the org chart. It isn’t the policies. It isn’t the trainings. It’s the people which are populating those structures, which are interacting, which are meeting each other or not meeting each other. And I think that was a really important insight which has like, it pops up everywhere. Now, one of my big challenges at work is like how do I get enterprises to adopt AI?
Eva-Maria Hempe: That’s again, an organizational question. As much as a technological question, actually technological question is like, maybe not even half of it. A lot is really about how do you get people to adopt it? How I get people to use it? What are the incentives they’re listening to? Who has power in this organization? How is this organization really structured? So yeah, I still use some of the things I learned, I studied.
Grant Belgard: And what did you learn in your time with the NHS that you think tech sector often misses?
Eva-Maria Hempe: I think in the tech sector, it’s easy to look at everything through a technological lens that, oh yeah, we can improve this, we can do this. But a lot of my research and my work was about design thinking, which is very much empathy. You start with the end user, you immerse yourself into the end user. Ideally you get to observe, you get to shadow, but you get a real idea of what are people doing and what’s the real problems and how can technology help that? I think this empathy, this user-centric view is sometimes a little bit missing in tech. I think what we also discussed before, you’re creating a great tool and maybe the people you tested it with like it, but it has to fit into the workflow. It has to fit into the real life. It’s all about minimizing friction.
Eva-Maria Hempe: I was saying the other day, just like if you wanna drive real value in organization, it’s about having something that has as little a friction as possible and as much immediate value as possible. And then you’re gonna see adoption. If it’s high friction, it has to have even higher value. If it’s low value, it has to have even lower friction, but ideally it has both.
Grant Belgard: Can you tell us about your time at the World Economic Forum and how that impacted the work you do today?
Eva-Maria Hempe: Yeah, the forum really is about multi-stakeholder and what role policy plays. And again, about what are the right incentives and how can you align the incentives of multiple different parties towards a common goal. So what I did there, it was about the future of healthy. So how do you make staying healthy a business versus having people get sick first and then making them healthy again? I mean, that’s an established business model, but why are we there? Why can’t we just keep people healthy in the first place? And there it’s really about thinking through the food industry. How can we make it a better business for the food industry to sell healthy food? How can we make it better for the doctors to be paid to keep the patients healthy?
Eva-Maria Hempe: There’s models for that where they get basically paid per patient in their catchment area, but they don’t get paid for the procedures they do, but they get like a fixed fee. It has all its pros and cons, but really think through things from a joint value and joint incentive point of view. And like I said, again, when you’re trying to change big systems, whether it is an organization or whether here it is like a multi-organizational system, it’s really important. And this is something I think I couldn’t imagine a better place to learn how you navigate these things, how you deal with politicians, how you deal with all the different lobbyists and all the different interest groups and really try to drive towards a common goal. And I think there’s no better place than the forum to learn that.
Grant Belgard: Can you tell us about your time rowing in Cambridge and did that develop you in any way that’s useful today?
Eva-Maria Hempe: Yeah, I got to Cambridge twice. The first time I went to Cambridge, it was for a summer research as part of my master’s thesis. And I knew people and they made some connections for me. And so I was at Cambridge during the summer before the freshers arrived. And then the freshers, so the first year students all came in and all the clubs started recruiting and the rowing club started recruiting and they tried to recruit me. And I was like, yeah, no, I’m only here for a few more months it doesn’t make sense, I should still do it. And I didn’t do it. And then I came back to Germany where I was finishing my studies and everybody was like, oh, you were in Cambridge, did you row? I’m like, no. And then I really regretted it. I was like, well, I really should have.
Eva-Maria Hempe: So I promised myself if I make it back in for my PhD I’ll give rowing a go. And so I did, and initially I wasn’t that good. So I was in the second novice boat. I didn’t even make the first novice boat. I was in the second boat, but then I just kept at it. And I barely made the first boat in the next term. There’s three terms in Cambridge. And then in the third term, I was still in the first boat of my college, of my part of the university I was at. And then I was around for the summer. So I thought, okay, the university team is doing a summer program. I might as well try that. So I did that. And then they try to funnel you into joining the team full time. And I was like, well, Cambridge rowing.
Eva-Maria Hempe: The year, my first year I watched the Cambridge boat races and I was like, wow, it must be so nerve wracking and whatever. And then they were like, yeah, you did the summer program. Don’t you want to trial, like just try for the university? And I was like, okay, well, what’s the worst that could happen? I’d taken that lesson of where I hadn’t rowed and regretted it. I’m like, okay, I don’t want to regret. So I just went for it. And then I found myself on the starting line of that boat race, which I just watched a year before. So I went within 18 months from never having rowed in my life to rowing and winning a boat race. And I think the lesson here, as I said, there’s the one about no regrets.
Eva-Maria Hempe: I think the second one about that you’re just capable of a lot more than you give yourself credit for. And I think the third one also just about the power of habits and the power of persistence and the power of community. So there’s nicer things than getting up every single morning at five o’clock, going to the train station, going rowing, barely making it back for nine o’clock to go and to your lab and do your work. And then at five o’clock going back to row. But it’s incredibly disciplining because you only have from nine to five. There is just no, oh, I’ll do this later. You have to be done at five because then you have to leave and go train and you have to be there for training. You can’t skip training.
Eva-Maria Hempe: And so I thought that was actually really useful to fall into this rhythm and go along with it and also shape your environment in a way that helps you do the things you want to do. Because like I said, it’s just not like, I don’t want to get up at five, but I just have to. And then once you’re back from training, you actually feel pretty good. And of course winning the race, nothing feels as good as that. But even if I would have lost the race, I still like, yeah, it was interesting because just before the race, it was about an hour or two before the start. And I remember we were in the boat bay and did like a little circle of the whole crew. And until then I had a bit of nerves, but from that moment on, I was just calm. All the nervousness, all the nerves were just gone.
Eva-Maria Hempe: And I was just like, well, I put everything into this I could, I have no regrets. So whatever happens now on the water, I can look back at this day and I’m proud because I did whatever I could to get to this point. And I think that was interesting because the year before I thought those people must be so nervous when they sit on the start line. But actually when I sat on the start line, I was just calm, I was just ready to do this. And basically put in the work.
Grant Belgard: Why NVIDIA, what sealed the decision for you to join?
Eva-Maria Hempe: It’s because we are a $4 trillion company. No, of course not. Actually, when we joined, I wasn’t. When I joined NVIDIA, it wasn’t a $4 trillion company. No, it’s just, I couldn’t imagine another place right now where you’ll have this impact on the entire ecosystem of healthcare. We work with everybody. We’re the one AI company which works with everybody else. So I get to work with startups. I get to work with established companies. I’m on the forefront of what’s possible. And at the same time on the forefront of what’s possible to do an organization like the thing we thought before. I mean, on the one hand side, we’re looking at models which can design proteins based on 3D structures.
Eva-Maria Hempe: But on the other hand, we’re also looking at rolling out procurement agents because that solves a real problem in the organization today. So it’s just a really exciting place to be at the center of the action around AI and healthcare. And so in general, it just felt like a place where a lot of the things I’ve been doing in the past sort of all came together. Like the multi-stakeholder management of the forum, the strategizing of almost 10 years in consulting, the operationally leading a team and helping people and creating strategies and tactics to make your number, which I did at VMware. And yeah, it just wrapped into sort of this one package of doing something really exciting and really exciting in a field I’m super passionate about.
Grant Belgard: For early career computational biologists who were looking at entering industry, what three skills should they cultivate now?
Eva-Maria Hempe: It’s a bit difficult to say because I’m not a computational biologist, but I think it’s also maybe not so much about the computational and the biologist. I just assume people are well-trained in those fields. I think what’s really important is for them to listen, to sort of to listen where the problems are, what’s being done, where people struggle with. I think the other thing is to really understand value. So I think there’s a lot of interesting work. If you want to do really cool and interesting work, and maybe it’s a bit controversial, but then academia is the place to be. Like if you just are in for the cool, by all means, that’s what academia is supposed to be. If you’re going into industry, then you need to have a nose for value. You need to start to understand like what’s value.
Eva-Maria Hempe: And value can be very different things. Value doesn’t necessarily mean the biggest grossing drug. It can also just be in line with the research portfolio of the organization. It can be in line with individual values of particular managers, but you need to understand value. I think the last thing it’s about teamwork, because so many of these things by now become so difficult that you just can’t solve them alone. You’re dependent on working with others who are bringing complementary skills and complementary experiences. So I would say three things are listening, understanding value, and working well in a team.
Grant Belgard: For life science founders, when is it worth building their own models versus taking existing models or platforms?
Eva-Maria Hempe: So I think you have to be smart. So do you really have an edge? And AI, in my mind, I always think about in three elements. The one is data, compute, and algorithms. So compute, there are some people who have an edge because they can just buy compute for billions of dollars, but that might not be your edge as a founder. So then it probably leaves either algorithms or data. And if you have something there, yeah, you might want to go for it. But very often, actually, you don’t necessarily need to build a model from scratch. You might not even have enough data to build a good model from scratch. And it might be much more worthwhile for what you’re trying to do and you’re coming back to the point of value. What is the value you’re creating?
Eva-Maria Hempe: It might actually be better to stand on the shoulders of giants and just taking a foundation model and retraining it. And in general, I would always advocate for using frameworks out there because they make your work easier. So BioNeMo is not a model per se, but it’s also a framework which helps you do your models better. And I think you shouldn’t write your own data loader and you shouldn’t have tried to configure guardrails from scratch. Like you have, as a founder, you’re massively resource constrained. So try to think about what are the things where you can really differentiate and focus on those and then try to use platforms, existing tools for all the rest.
Eva-Maria Hempe: And I hope that people are taking something from this podcast is we have so much things out there which we’re putting out there, usually often as open source. We have frameworks and libraries and NIMs and all of this is intended to help you and avoid reinventing the wheel. Like if you’re doing medical imaging, you don’t need to write your own segmentation tool. Like this is all out there. Take it and then build a killer application on top of it. But be smart, look at what’s out there and NVIDIA can offer so much and your favorite AI engine, if you ask it, I have this particular problem, what are the latest NVIDIA frameworks? It should give you a whole list of libraries and frameworks you can use, whether it’s for data science or data frames, et cetera. There’s just so much out there.
Eva-Maria Hempe: I think the last thing for life science founders is as well look into Inception. So Inception is NVIDIA’s free virtual accelerator. So it gets you access to NVIDIA experts, which help you even better find the right tools and right frameworks, which make your money last longer. It gets you into a community of like-minded people and there’s also some programs about cloud credits and or discounts for hardware. So join Inception, look at what NVIDIA has and other people have put out there before you build it yourself and just be really smart about what really drives value.
Grant Belgard: What’s your boldest prediction for AI and drug discovery over the next five years?
Eva-Maria Hempe: I don’t know if it’s five years. I would hope it’s five years, but I think at some point we will look back at the way we do drug discovery today and it will seem as archaic and plainly said stupid as the alchemists trying to turn lead into gold. Like today, if you tell kids, oh, back in the middle ages, you had all those alchemists and they were cooking and the idea was lead is this less noble material and you can turn it into more noble material as gold. People are like, why? And I think we look at the same way a lot of things we do today in drug discovery and we’re just like, why did everyone ever think this is going to work?
Eva-Maria Hempe: And there are like on a more practical level, there’s really smart and really interesting things going on about virtual cells and like better predicting like the link between the genome and actually how cells behave. And then also not just cells because we’re not just cells, we’re whole tissues. So I think we’ll see a lot more understanding and understanding biology, at least to some extent. And I think that will get us to this point of alchemy and how could we have been so stupid.
Grant Belgard: What’s a learning resource you would recommend for every trainee?
Eva-Maria Hempe: I think it’s not a learning resource in the conventional way, but I would really encourage to go on build.nvidia.com because it just shows you what’s possible and you have all those different models and you can play with them, you can get an idea what they can do. And then you can also go to the blueprints and basically see how these are put together. So I think that’s a great resource. And then I would maybe pair that with like, I’m a big fan of perplexity, but also any other LLM agent of choice. I think they are great teachers. They can teach you anything. And the other day I used perplexity in voice mode. And so I was like making dinner and just having this really natural conversation. And there is no stupid question. There is no judging.
Eva-Maria Hempe: You can like ask it anything like just, can you please explain to me again how this works? And I sometimes also use it for some of the NVIDIA stuff. I’m like, okay, can we go deeper on RAPIDS? Can you explain the different libraries? Like how does this work? Why does this work? So I think it’s a great tool to learn about AI, but also just anything else you wanna learn. And it can also challenge you. You can actually also ask it to quiz you and to make sure you really understand things and you explain it back to the machine. The machine actually gives you feedback whether you got it right or you need to brush up a bit more.
Grant Belgard: Yeah, I was actually doing the same thing with a bit of yard work yesterday. Also highly recommend that, voice mode is great. Eva-Maria, thank you so much for joining us. It was great.
Eva-Maria Hempe: Thank you, I really enjoyed it.
