The thing that people don't know is that whole 3 to 5 years of making and testing molecules, we've outsourced it entirely to China.
So it all happens in China and it's really dangerous. Right. So there's this amazing quote from Andy Grove who used to run Intel when he was talking about semiconductors and the same thing happening there, and he said, "Abandoning today's commodity manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging industry." That is the path that we are on with pharma. It's really dangerous, but it's not too late to take it back, and that's why we care so much about bringing this back to the US.
Hello everyone, welcome back to MTS. Today I am joined live with Kevin Weil, the co-founder and CEO of Warp Sciences, which emerged from stealth today with $215 million to bring AI into the lab and build US chemistry services for drug research. Kevin, super excited to talk to you. Welcome to MTS.
Thank you for joining. I know you guys are fresh off the launch announcement. You announced it earlier this morning. Tell me a little bit about what was actually announced. Why now?
Yeah, so at Warp, we're using AI and robotics to help the world discover medicines faster.
So we're building robotic labs that do science at scale, and we're doing it here in America. There's like two big pieces to this. One is I think robotic labs are going to be one of the best ways that we have to accelerate science across the board, right? Partly because you can just run more experiments when you have labs operating 24/7, but also because doing this kind of science at scale is the way that we're going to generate training data which the models desperately need to become better at the kind of core science like chemistry, biology, drug discovery. The other thing, and a lot of people don't know this, we need to reshore scientific capabilities from China so that we don't lose our pharma industry the way that we lost solar and drones and manufacturing. And so for us, there is one solution to both of these, which is we are building a next-generation pre-clinical CRO. That's a contract research organization starting with small molecule chemistry, and it's built here in America. So we're not developing drugs on our own. We are building the infrastructure so that everybody who does develop drugs can go faster.
Yeah, this is particularly interesting around the reshoring piece. I think this is a key area that most people don't totally realize. What exactly is happening right now? Like why is this a concern that we're not doing it fully here in the States?
Yeah. So maybe I'll step back and give just kind of an overview of the drug discovery process. I think it's helpful context.
So imagine you and I start a drug discovery company. Like you're coming off of your, you know, PhD in biology or something, and you've been studying some form of cancer. And usually you have a biological hypothesis. You say, okay, there's some protein and maybe it like overexpresses, and we need to inhibit it. And we would start this biotech with a hypothesis that if we can inhibit this protein with a drug, then like we have a positive effect on people's cancer. So we would find a molecule that bound to the protein, but most likely that first molecule that you find is going to be toxic, or it's going to not be soluble, or it's not going to be very potent, you know. So instead of being able to take a little pill of it, you have to take a kilogram of it, which you know makes it not viable as a drug. And so the next step that we would go through is we would spend the next 3 to 5 years making variations of this molecule, hoping that we could find one that was less toxic, more potent, more soluble, more selective, etc. So you go through this big long process, and once you find that one, then you go into clinical trials and all that, right? So this is the drug making process. But the thing that people don't know is that whole 3 to 5 years of making and testing molecules, we've outsourced it entirely to China.
So it all happens in China and it's really dangerous. Right. This is a core part of the process of turning an idea into a new medicine, and we cannot depend on what is, you know, a geopolitical adversary to do this work for us.
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So what you're saying is that right now it's not totally possible to do complete sovereign science, especially in some of these super extreme and important use cases like here in the United States.
Yeah. I mean, look, it rhymes with the manufacturing industry and what happened, right? You start with the manufacturing industry. We started by outsourcing and offshoring the sort of low-skilled manufacturing work, but then over time we pushed more and more out of the country and we lost the muscle. And at the same time, China and others grew and got better and better at it, and now there's a whole bunch of manufacturing that we cannot do anymore. So there's this amazing quote from Andy Grove who used to run Intel when he was talking about semiconductors and the same thing happening there, and he said, "Abandoning today's commodity manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging industry."
That is the path that we are on with pharma. It's really dangerous, but it's not too late to take it back, and that's why we care so much about bringing this back to the US.
But if you're going to bring it back, you've got to change the economics, right? There's an economic reason why this all moved out, and the way that you change the economics is you do it with robotics and AI and automation, and so that is the reason to believe that we can actually go do this now.
