Relationships That Make TechBio Go ‘Round: David Roblin on The Long Run

David Roblin is today’s guest on The Long Run podcast.

David is the CEO of London-based Relation Therapeutics. The company uses multi-omic tools to look for drug targets in human tissue samples. It seeks to find the relationships between perturbed biological states and disease, with the help of machine learning.

Relation emphasizes relationships in another sense as well – the cultural kind among biologists, engineers, physicians and other professionals who need to find ways to meld their disciplines together to improve biopharma R&D success rates.

David Roblin, CEO, Relation Therapeutics

The startup has raised more than $80 million to date from a diverse group of tech and biotech investors. Late last year, it announced a preclinical partnership with GSK in which the pharma giant is supporting Relation’s work to discover novel drugs for fibrosis and osteoarthritis.

David comes to this work after a long career as a physician, then as an R&D executive at large biopharma companies Bayer and Pfizer, and in translational research from The Francis Crick Institute..

I met David and the team in London in late January. I was wearing another hat there, as part of a fundraising event for the Timmerman Traverse for Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. I learned about the London biotech community, and how the many players – academia, hospitals, startups, and large tech and pharma companies – are seeking to work together and put the pieces together to improve the biopharma R&D enterprise. I hope you will learn something too.

Now, please join me and David Roblin on The Long Run.