Jen Nwankwo is the founder and CEO of 1910 Genetics, a biotech company accelerating drug development timelines. According to the National Institutes of Health, drug development costs 12-15 years in time and approximately $2.6 billion in money. Nwankwo is taking the guesswork out of drug discovery by integrating AI, computation, and biological automation to accelerate the design of small molecule and protein therapeutics.
Growing up in Nigeria, Nwankwo witnessed the scourge of sickle cells. A leading killer of children in Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa, she was fascinated by Dr James Bryan Herrick’s sickle cell anemia case study. This motivated her to emigrate to the US in pursuit of tertiary education. She graduated from Claflin University with a BS in Biochemistry and from Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development with a Postgraduate Certificate in Clinical Pharmacology, Drug Development & Regulation.
In 2016, Nwankwo graduated with a Ph.D. in Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics from Tufts University School of Medicine. Her Doctoral dissertation on how Calpain-1 contributes to platelet hyperactivity and pain sensitivity led to the discovery of a new drug target for sickle-cell disease. While working as a a management consultant with Bain Capital, Nwankwo became immensely interested in AI and was inspired to found a business based on the technology.
The idea for 1910 Genetics came out of what I saw as an opportunity for technology to help address pain points that I was experiencing as a pharmacologist. I quickly saw that AI—and machine learning as a subset of that—could really help us take advantage of our historical failures. Machine learning could help us learn from those failures in a more intelligent way. It actually contextualized our successes better. Often, even when we’re successful, it’s almost as if we’re successful in spite of ourselves.
Sources: Crunchbase, LinkedIn, YCombinator,
