The Future Is Now: Tom Chittenden of Genuity Science On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up Drug Development
Find your calling in life and follow it. Whatever it may be, your passion will take you to amazing places. Mine is understanding the natural order of the universe and how life has evolved on the planet.
As a part of our series about cutting edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tom Chittenden, PhD, DPhil, PStat.
Dr. Chittenden is Chief Technology Officer and Founding Director of the Genuity Science Advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Laboratory. He is an Omega Society Fellow and an Accredited Professional Statistician™ with the American Statistical Association. He also holds faculty appointments at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Harvard Medical School.
His work has been published in top-tier scientific journals, including featured articles in Nature and Science. Recently, Dr. Chittenden was a winner of the Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards presented by the Business Intelligence Group. In 2019, he was named among the top 100 AI Pioneers in Drug Discovery and Advanced Healthcare. He is regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on AI and causal statistical machine learning in the biomedical sciences.
Tom holds a PhD in Molecular Cell Biology and Biotechnology from Virginia Tech and a DPhil in Computational Statistics from the University of Oxford. His multidisciplinary postdoctoral training includes experimental investigations in Molecular and Cellular Cardiology from the Dartmouth Medical School; Biostatistics and Computational Biology from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Harvard School of Public Health; and Computational Statistics, Statistical Methodology, and Statistical Machine Learning from the University of Oxford.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I have always had a strong sense of inquiry. After three years of active service in Marine Corps in the early 1980s, I became fascinated with human biology as it is arguably the most complex system in the known universe. There are 37+ trillion cells in the average adult human body governed by still unknown rules of natural engineering and selection.
One of my defining moments was in a graduate school biotechnology class in the mid-1990s. The professor was discussing DNA microarray chips, and he was explaining the actual application of this new technology. The professor said that a single assay could capture the state of the entire human gene transcriptome. And at the time, we knew that there were about 22,000 genes, so there was something that just resonated with me. I had a strong sense that this newly founded technology would lead to future breakthroughs in medicine.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
It is the work we are doing now with collaborators at the University of Strasbourg and Professor Seiamak Bahram and his team at the medical school. Together, we are looking at molecular drivers of COVID-19, and what we have uncovered is a complex disease whose etiology results in Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. By inhibiting the expression of a specific protein on the cell surface, we have been able to block the virus’s ability of getting into human lung epithelial cells, which in turn significantly decreases viral replication.
Can you tell us about this cutting-edge technological breakthrough? How do you think that will help people?
Essentially, we are keeping the virus “out of the party,” so to speak. This is different from how some vaccines currently operate, in that they train our immune system to fight viruses. The work from Strasbourg is showing another mechanism to fight the SARS-CoV-2 virus in that we can prevent it from entering cells in the body. Our results indicate that the virus is unable to replicate because it cannot get into human cells in the first place, similar to how a security guard can prevent people from entering a party or a nightclub. The virus is blocked from invading human cells. And as a result of this work, we have found a therapeutic, currently in clinical trials for another condition, that could quite possibly block the abnormal expression on the surface of human cells of this “security guard” protein.
All of this is to say that we have quite possibly discovered another method to mitigate infection and spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The technology breakthrough involved using AI and machine learning (ML) to better understand the etiology of COVID-19. This is something that we have replicated with other diseases — what is exciting is that our AI/ML approach is disease agnostic. For example, in collaboration with investigators at Yale University Medical School, the Advanced AI Research Laboratory at Genuity Science extensively studied cells, which make up blood vessels and the causal gene drivers that lead to thoracic aortic aneurysms. In experimental mouse-model systems, results from our AI team’s time-series analysis of single-cell RNA sequencing data showed that a single cluster of abnormal smooth muscle cells produced thickening of the vessel wall, which led to arteriosclerosis, and subsequently to thoracic aortic aneurysm.
What we are witnessing is the convergence of robust AI/ML technology, improved standardization of clinical data, and enhanced collaboration among scientists and clinicians to find working solutions for complex biomedical problems.
How do you think this might change the world?
Well, let me address how we can help the clinical trial process, which is a vital part of getting new drugs to patients who need them. The most recent credible study that I have come across was in 2015, where total revenue from the entire pharmaceutical industry was $1.2 trillion. Of that, $150 billion was spent on R&D. Now 75 percent of that, about $112 billion in 2015, can be directly attributed to failed clinical trials. Another figure that many people may not know is that 86 percent of all clinical trials fail.
We are now seeing an increase in the number and complexity of clinical drug trials. At Genuity Science, we believe the reason so many trials fail is because we do not fully understand human biology. By identifying the true causal drivers of human disease, we will be able to help pharma develop more effective therapeutics for complex pathologies, such as cardiovascular disease, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), and central nervous system diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease.
I point to our 2020 paper published in Cell Stem Cell, which outlines our research with Professor Mike Simons MD, FACC, FAHA, and his team at Yale University Medical School. In this study, we were able to identify a small abnormal population of smooth muscle cells that cause thoracic aortic aneurysms. We were then able to identify the gene responsible for the aberrant cell behavior.
If we can help pharma companies improve the process of drug target discovery, it can yield benefits all the way along the drug development continuum. Ultimately, this means we can potentially develop drugs faster with smaller patient cohorts and with less cost.
Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
There is a fair amount of apprehension associated with AI/ML. For example, some people I have talked to are fearful these technologies will eventually replace physicians with automated healthcare diagnostics. I believe this is simply fear of the unknown. A more realistic goal of AI/ML, in my opinion, is to greatly enhance the physicians’ ability to diagnosis and treat disease, as these in silico approaches are firmly rooted in science and evidence-based research.
Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?
I do not believe there has been a single tipping point. Sound science has brought us here. Genuity Science is using AI/ML, the most advanced technology in human history, to advance our collective understanding of human biology to better understand disease. In other words, I believe we need to gain a more comprehensive understanding of both human biology and disease before we can build more effective therapeutics.
Where we are today is exciting. With the application of these AI/ML methods, we are starting to learn more of what drives rather than what simply correlates to disease. These in silico approaches allow us to build robust methodologies to identify causal molecular drivers of disease. And we have a strong track record in this space, a scientifically, peer-reviewed published track record that indicates all of this is possible.
What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?
Time and teamwork. By working closely with our partners in pharma, biotech, and academia, I believe we will be able to address the most complex, fundamental questions in biology. It is going to take a team effort, and we are extraordinarily collaborative at Genuity Science. It will involve a lot of people, across many disciplines, thinking outside the box.
What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?
We have been discussing the importance of the AI/ML in the biomedical sciences. Our work has been published in a number of outlets, including Journal of Precision Medicine as well as our peer-review papers published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Nature Metabolism, Cell Stem Cell as mentioned above, and most recently the new Cell Press journal, Patterns. Moreover, we recently did the podcast “Outcomes Rocket” to bring AI/ML awareness to healthcare organizations and venture capitalists.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
There are many people helping with this endeavor. It starts with the patients who allow us to collect, sequence, and study their samples. It also involves the clinicians we work with, the data scientists who analyze patient data, and the pharma companies who see this innovation as a means to deliver more efficacious medicines to patients. My overall success stems from the collective efforts of all those working toward the common goal of eradicating human disease and the suffering that comes along with it.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Find your calling in life and follow it. Whatever it may be, your passion will take you to amazing places. Mine is understanding the natural order of the universe and how life has evolved on the planet. I believe studying human biology with advanced AI/ML strategies will lead to a better understanding of the nature and origins of human disease. Thus, I am currently applying quantum information theory to decipher an elemental molecular code regulating patterns of biological complexity in order to better understand human disease initiation and progression. Once in hand, I believe we will be able to end disease and the suffering that comes along with it. My lifelong sense of inquiry propelled me from the enlisted ranks of the Marine Corps to leading a global research initiative in artificial intelligence and machine learning in the biomedical sciences.
“Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart” — Confucius
Some very well-known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
For the most part, we are still developing drugs with one-hand tied behind our collective back. Even though the Human Genome was sequenced 18 years ago, we have still not been able to fully leverage complex, high-dimensional biomedical data in our research and development pipelines.
Genuity Science is changing the way we target and develop drugs by using a combination of population-scale genomics and detailed medical and lifestyle data, an extremely robust software platform for analyzing data at scale, and a groundbreaking approach to AI/ML. Over the past six years, we have developed new paths to treatments in ways that are faster and less expensive than ever before. With better starting points, Genuity Science can vastly improve the success rate of clinical trials, bringing more effective therapies to patients.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
They can find me on LinkedIn, and they can visit www.genuitysci.com for more details.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
You’re welcome. Thank you for the opportunity to share what we are working on. It is exciting to work on improving our understanding of molecular cell biology and what drives human disease. While these technologies will evolve, we now have the in-silico methodologies in place to eventually eradicate it. Perhaps not in my lifetime, but certainly in my granddaughter’s lifetime. This is what inspires me and many others in the biomedical sciences. It still gets me out of bed every day.
The Future Is Now: Tom Chittenden of Genuity Science On How Their Technological Innovation Will… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
