Q&A with Dr. Catherine Howsham, Scientific Project Manager @ LabGenius
As a Project Manager at LabGenius, Catherine Howsham works across both pipeline and platform projects to ensure that scientific work packages are efficiently delivered to a high standard. Prior to LabGenius, Catherine held Senior Group Leader roles at both Novartis and Cancer Research UK.
Let’s start with an easy one, can you tell us a bit more about your career to date and what led you to a role at LabGenius?
After having spent my gap year working in a chemistry lab developing novel antibiotics at SmithKline Beecham, I knew that I wanted to pursue a career in drug discovery. I went on to study Chemistry to PhD level, followed by a postdoc in Synthetic Chemistry.
Following my time in academia, I spent 10 years working at Novartis, developing therapeutics for respiratory diseases. Initially I was a Medicinal Chemist, designing and synthesising potential therapeutic molecules and I then transitioned to Project Leadership, which involved providing scientific direction for hit selection projects through to early clinical trials.
After leaving Novartis I wanted to gain oncology experience, and so moved to Cancer Research UK to lead a team of Project and Clinical Study Managers, working on novel cancer therapeutics in late preclinical/early clinical trials.
When I decided to return to work after a career break to look after my two young children, I was attracted to LabGenius’ clear mission — to accelerate drug discovery by pioneering the development of a machine learning-driven technology platform. Working at LabGenius gives me the opportunity to learn new technologies whilst contributing to the company’s growth by applying my knowledge of drug discovery and development.
Which parts of your role do you find the most inspiring?
I find working with such a diverse group of scientists who are laser-focussed and challenge themselves to deliver every day incredibly inspiring. In addition to that, seeing such disparate disciplines come together to solve a unique and complex problem is incredibly exciting and I love the energy that comes with that.
Can you tell us about the part your role plays in achieving our mission?
Successful drug discovery involves coordination of multidisciplinary teams. In LabGenius’ case, this is made more complex by the need to coordinate between wet-lab scientists running experiments and Data Scientists who put the data to work by using it to build predictive models. My role as Project Manager is to ensure that the different teams work seamlessly together by developing clear plans that ensure that everyone knows how and when their expertise is required.
Where do you see LabGenius four years from now and what excites you about the company’s future?
In four years’ time we should be seeing the first immune cell engagers identified using our machine learning-driven platform progressing through clinical trials, with a strong pipeline of potential drugs following closely behind.
I’m excited by many aspects of LabGenius’ future, including the opportunity not just to develop life changing therapeutics, but also to be recognised as game changers in the way we develop these therapies. It would be great to see not just our own internal pipeline of drugs coming through, but for LabGenius to be a partner of choice for other companies looking to use artificial intelligence to boost their chances of success developing antibody therapeutics.
Where do you think machine intelligence will have the biggest impact on the discovery and development of new drugs?
For me, the biggest impact comes from the ability to tackle the harder challenges — the low hanging fruit has already been picked and there is a reason the more complex problems are left behind — human ingenuity alone can’t solve the problem, or, if it could, it would take too long due to the huge number of unknowns that would need to be explored. Machine intelligence enables us to look at multiple variables at once, and takes away human biases to explore larger areas of sequence space with a higher chance of identifying drugs either for new targets, or for those previously thought of as undruggable, in a manageable timeframe.
Thank you for your insights Catherine!
To finish, we asked our CSO, Dr. Gino Van Heeke, to comment on the importance and impact of the Project Manager role at LabGenius.
“The Project Manager role is critical to the smooth delivery of our internal and partnered programmes. Catherine’s work allows us to supercharge the continued expansion and utilisation of our platform to deliver across multiple antibody discovery programmes in parallel.”
