Kristina Kitko

As biology becomes programmable and AI accelerates discovery, startups are generating breakthrough innovations at unprecedented speed. Yet translating these advances into real-world therapies still depends on effective collaboration with global pharmaceutical organizations. This session explores how the innovation ecosystem connects early-stage breakthroughs to scalable development, bringing together leaders from startup incubation, external innovation, and pharma strategy. Speakers will examine how AI-native biotech companies engage with pharma today: how startups become “pharma-ready,” how external innovation teams evaluate and structure partnerships, and what collaboration models are emerging as biology and computation converge. From early ecosystem support and venture building to strategic alliances and co-development pathways, the discussion will provide a practical look at how ideas move from discovery to patient impact in the AI era.

AI is reshaping drug discovery, but its real impact comes when companies collaborate, since no one company has enough data to encompass every chemical space.  In this talk, you will learn about Lilly TuneLab, a collaborative web-based platform that hosts AI/ML models trained on decades of proprietary Lilly data, where members contribute data via federated learning to help make the models more generalizable.  Biotechs and start ups can immediately accelerate their own programs - predicting the drug-like properties of small molecules or assessing antibody developability properties, without having to build their own models or find training data.