A Woman in the TechBio Arena: Najat Khan on The Long Run

Najat Khan is today’s guest on The Long Run.

She is the chief R&D and chief commercial officer of Salt Lake City-based Recursion. The company is one of the first-generation companies that have sought to reinvent drug R&D from the ground up with automated technologies that collect a lot of biological data and then analyze that data with AI algorithms. Some call this approach TechBio or industrialized drug discovery or engineered biology. The basic idea is to make drug discovery faster, cheaper and to improve the probability of success.

Najat Khan, chief R&D officer, chief commercial officer, Recursion

Longtime listeners may want to go back and listen to Recursion co-founder and CEO Chris Gibson on The Long Run in May 2022, as he talked about the company’s origin story.

Najat joins Recursion now that it has a much bigger pipeline of drug candidates to test its founding vision. She has a variety of experiences in healthcare and drug discovery. She previously worked to integrate AI applications into the R&D operations at Johnson & Johnson, where she was chief data science officer and a senior vice president overseeing portfolio strategy. She has a wide range of experiences across the R&D enterprise, at both large and small companies.

This is an extremely hard challenge. Despite some of the breathtaking advances in AI of late, we will not be getting magic bullet cancer drugs popping off the AI assembly line anytime soon. A lot of thoughtful work needs to be done first to set up the platforms right, and to chip away with incremental advances at various bottlenecks along the R&D continuum.

Najat is one of the people in the arena, so to speak, who understands the range of challenges and is humble about what it will take to get the job done.

Now before we get started, a word from the sponsor of The Long Run. 

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And, some of you have seen that I’m celebrating the 10^th anniversary of Timmerman Report.

Reaching this milestone has gotten me thinking about my various activities, and that includes The Long Run. My friends at The Linus Group helped craft a survey so you can provide me some feedback on what you like, what you don’t, and what you’d like to see more or less of from this podcast. It only takes 5 minutes, and if you complete the survey, you will be entered with a chance to win one of three complimentary annual subscriptions to Timmerman Report (a $199 value). 

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Now, please join me and Najat Khan on The Long Run.