The One About AI x BioPharma (ft. Calico Life Sciences)

While agents and LLMs dominate the headlines, a quieter but equally profound transformation is taking place in biopharma. Drug discovery today faces a growing challenge known as Eroom’s Law — the rising cost and time required to develop new drugs. At the same time, advances in wet-lab automation, molecular biology, and modern AI techniques are opening up new ways to tackle this problem. Join Zhenghao Chen (Director of ML, Calico Life Sciences) as he shares how AI and machine learning are being applied across the drug discovery pipeline, including: Applying representation learning to identify genetic associations from large human cohortsUsing high-content microscopy imaging and machine learning to support phenotypic screeningDesigning and optimizing therapeutic molecules with generative models From identifying promising biological targets to designing potential therapeutic molecules, explore what it actually looks like to build AI systems that work alongside experimental biology. More About the Speaker Zhenghao Chen is Director of Machine Learning at Calico Life Sciences, an Alphabet‑founded research company focused on understanding aging and developing interventions for longer, healthier lives. At Calico, Zhenghao leads a multidisciplinary team of AI scientists and engineers building platforms to accelerate the drug discovery pipeline. His work spans representation learning, generative modeling, and machine learning applications for high‑content biological data. Prior to Calico, he worked in data science and analytics at Coursera, where he helped build core infrastructure and models for large‑scale studies on online learning effectiveness. Zhenghao holds advanced training in AI and has published on applying ML to complex biological problems. More About the Series ​AI Wednesdays is Lorong AI’s weekly gathering, bringing together practitioners, researchers and innovators for technical discussions on research insights, product development and engineering practices. ​Get involved: Learn more about Lorong AI | Speaker Sign-up | WhatsApp Community | LinkedIn | X