Liisi Laaniste spent over a decade studying one of the deadliest brain cancers in the world, glioblastoma, which kills most patients within 15 months and hasn't seen a meaningful change in standard treatment since 2005. She published in top journals. She ranked first in her class at Uppsala University. She earned her PhD in Computational Systems Biology at Imperial College London.
And then she decided that publishing papers wasn't going to be enough to actually save anyone.
So she left academia and co-founded CoSyne Therapeutics: a vertically integrated AI drug discovery company building precision medicines for brain diseases that pharma has largely walked away from. CoSyne has raised $7.8M from Amino Collective, Backed VC, Phoenix Court, and Meltwind Advisory and has built the world's largest single-cell CRISPRi perturbation dataset, generated entirely from real patient tumor tissue.
In this episode, Brennan and Liisi go deep on the gap between what science discovers and what actually reaches patients and what it takes to close it.
In this episode:
- The 70% reproducibility crisis: most published biology and chemistry research cannot be replicated in a lab (and AI is being trained on all of it)
- How AI is cutting the drug development timeline from 16 years to 2
- The "publish or perish" system that actively disincentivizes scientists from checking each other's work
- What a squid in Japan, an octopus, and a jellyfish can teach us about curing disease
- Why "you can just do things" is the most important lesson academia never taught her
- The co-founder as the real moat and why finding the right one is the unicorn event of any startup
- Bryan Johnson: legitimate longevity experiment or something else entirely?
Subscribe for more episodes of Not Another Podcast. If you know anyone building at the intersection of AI and life sciences, send them this one.
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