So my name is Andrew Radin. I'm the CEO and co-founder of twoXAR, and we are an artificial intelligence-based drug discovery company. By training, I'm a computer scientist. I did a bunch of startups prior to this. All in consumer space, all, you know, either large, computer, large data science, I've worked on the systems that power nations, telephone calls, I've built large scale advertising networks that have served billions of ads and hit tens of millions of people, I've built large scale video games on Facebook, all these sorts of things. And all these projects, while I was doing that as an entrepreneur, I kind of had a second life if you will, working on social causes. So, when I was a child, my grandmother started a homeless shelter with some of her friends, which I've been involved with all the way to today as an adult. My wife and I have traveled to third world countries and helped people in need. And all this work had been very separate. And a number of years ago, I thought, I'd like to bring those things together in some way. I'm very interested in helping the homeless in some meaningful way, and about that time, one of the largest, if not the largest homeless encampment in the United States, was close to my home, it's called The Jungle in San Jose. And I was thinking, I really should get involved and make a big impact. And my wife, a very wise woman, said, that's a social issue, that's not where your skills can be best applied. As a computer scientist, maybe you should think about how you can use data science to make a more meaningful impact in the world. And so long story short, that's how I ended up at Stanford, learning about how to use computer science specifically in the field of medicine. And that got me to where I am today. Through the SCPD program at Stanford, there is a course offered in the bioinformatics track. And what that course is about, is learning how other people have used data science and computer science to do some sort of medical discovery, or move the field forward in some way. And in that course, at least when I took it, you learn a lot about what other people had done, methods they used, techniques they used, to come up with some discovery. And one of the guest lecturers was given by Marina Sirota, she's a professor now at UCSF. And she was talking about her work in using gene expression, micro-arrays, and differential expression between drug signatures with those who had, and didn't have a disease, to figure out which new medications could be potentially effective. And I just thought her work was absolutely fascinating, because it came on the heels of another lecture, where we were talking about this concept of inter-group genomics, which is pulling in data from lots of different instrumentation, lots of different sort of views, if you will, about a particular problem, and how you can incorporate those different sort of datasets to figure out what's real, and what's a false positive. And all of this just kind of clicked together in my head with some work I'd done in a couple of previous startups, where I was thinking about this larger idea of incorporating this wide diversity of datasets, and putting together a mechanism which helped explore those data sets and figure out what's real and what's not. Right? And so that was the genesis of my project in that course, and then ultimately the technology behind the company today.
