Now might be a golden age for drug discovery. Over the past 20 years, immunotherapy drugs have transformed cancer treatment; migraine sufferers have finally gotten real relief with a class of drug called gepants; and the COVID-19 vaccines, developed in record time, prevented 20 million deaths worldwide in just the first year after they became available. But when it comes to making sure treatments are safe and effective — the clinical trial phase of drug development — the process can take years.
Dash Bio CEO Dave Johnson, MS ’10, PhD ’11, is on a mission to change that.
Johnson and his small team at the year-old biotech startup, operating out of a purpose-built lab space in Boston, are helping to speed the testing of lifesaving medicines so that the patients who need them can get them sooner. They developed a high-tech approach to accelerate one particularly sluggish part of this process: analyzing blood samples to measure how the drug is affecting the trial’s volunteers.
In drug development, “there’s very little technology used in that space,” Johnson says. “It’s quite a lot of paper, quite a lot of manual processes. It’s like going back in time 20 years.”
Frustrated with this inefficiency, Johnson, who served as chief data and artificial intelligence officer for vaccine maker Moderna, along with former Moderna colleague Ander Tallet, realized that by combining robotics, AI and custom software, they could automate the sample analysis process, removing the possibility of human error and slashing the turnaround time from months to days.
With Dash Bio’s automated platform, drug researchers “get reliable, repeatable results every time,” says Johnson. The faster these bioanalyses can be done, the faster medicines make it to market. The company’s lab is up and running and is already serving several customers, Johnson says.
Eventually, Johnson hopes that Dash Bio’s platform, which can analyze three classes of assays, will make the drug development process affordable enough to allow even today’s most economically unfeasible treatments to see the light of day. “It’s incredibly expensive to bring a drug to market,” he says while emphasizing that science often isn’t the problem but, rather, economics.
“If we can transform this industry, we believe it’ll unleash a lot more innovation in this space.”