How harnessing human data could reinvent drug discovery

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 On this episode of McKinsey on Start-ups, we talk to David Berry, the founder and CEO of Valo Health, a human data-driven startup hoping to fundamentally alter the drug discovery and development process. Berry, a serial entrepreneur who has founded more than 30 companies (five of which are publicly traded), believes the industry’s longtime approach to generating new drugs is too costly, slow, and ineffective to keep pace in the battle against disease. Valo is one of scores of AI and machine learning startups emerging lately that aim to use human datasets to reinvent the drug discovery and development process, but Berry feels his company’s distinctive approach gives it an advantage. Instead of targeting just a single therapeutic and disease category at a time, Valo relies on its Opal computational platform to simultaneously pursue potential treatments for multiple conditions in an integrated fashion. Valo’s wealth of longitudinal, high-density data is another asset, according to Berry. Assets are critical in such an expensive undertaking, and Valo has raised close to half a billion dollars in funding since its founding in 2019.See www.mckinsey.com/privacy-policy for privacy information