Reinventing Drug Discovery with AI: Marc Tessier-Lavigne on The Long Run

Marc Tessier-Lavigne is today’s guest on The Long Run.

Marc is the chairman and CEO of South San Francisco-based Xaira Therapeutics.

Xaira is using computers to design protein drugs from scratch, building on work from co-founder David Baker’s lab at the University of Washington.

Designing protein drugs on computers with ideal properties is a plenty big idea that won Baker the Nobel Prize in 2024. But there’s more to the company. Xaira is building a platform for drug discovery that gathers multiple types of biological data – genomic, proteomic, etc. – and feeds that into AI models to hopefully tease apart what’s causing disease, versus what’s merely hanging along for the ride. That information on what’s causing disease is supposed to help guide the design of these new targeted protein drugs from the ground up.

The hope at Xaira, and all other AI-assisted drug discovery companies, is ultimately to create a system that can make drug R&D faster, less expensive, and more predictable.

Xaira was co-founded and incubated by Arch Venture Partners and Foresite Labs. It debuted with $1 billion in committed capital in April 2024.

Marc is a neuroscientist by training. He was on the faculty at UCSF before he took an R&D leadership role at Genentech during its storied ascent as the leading cancer drug developer of the early 2000s. He returned to academia as president at Rockefeller University and then Stanford University. He left Stanford in 2023 amid some controversy, before he came back to industry with Xaira in 2024. Right now, he has the advantage of being in a startup at a moment of technological possibility – Xaira has a lot of money, brilliant people, and a clean slate to do something consequential for all of biopharma R&D. It doesn’t need to unlearn a lot of things to start doing them a different way.

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Please enjoy this conversation with Marc Tessier-Lavigne on The Long Run.