Patrick Collison, Co-founder, Arc Institute; Co-founder and CEO, Stripe  
Interviewer: Dr. Lloyd Minor, Stanford University School of Medicine

Brainstorm Health 2022 - A Life Sciences Revolution Could Be Silicon Valley’s Next Act

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Brainstorm Health 2022 - Life Sciences Revolution 

Brainstorm Health 2022 - Is A Life Sciences Revolution Silicon Valley’s Next Act? 


we're entering a renaissance in the life sciences and innovation of the life sciences increasingly will be defined by the convergence of biology biomedicine with information science and technology but it's best said there are a lot of hurdles we have to overcome the fact that our biomedical workforce Is in their 40s typically before they start their careers. The grants oftentimes reward incremental work rather than truly transformative work that there are challenges of getting from fundamental discovery to translation to human benefit. Joining me is Patrick collison, the Ceo and co founder of stripe stripe is a technology company focused on economic platforms for internet based businesses. Patrick and his brother John Co founded Stripe in 2010. They co founded it because of the difficulties they saw in internet companies processing payments and carrying out their economic activities Stripes phenomenally successful. Last year it processed over $600 billion dollars in transactions. Patrick hasn't stopped with strikes though. In 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, patrick started fast grants a program that he and other philanthropists funded to get money quickly to scientists who wanted to pivot their research to doing transformative studies in covid. And then in 2021 december 20 to 21 Patrick along with Silvana kerman, assistant professor of biochemistry at stanford and Patrick shoe. Assistant professor of bioengineering at Berkeley founded the Ark Institute and we're gonna talk about that today. Patrick, thanks, thanks so much for joining us today to see you and you of course were interested in computer science early on growing up near limerick Ireland. Um and but but your interests are capacious and you now have focused on interest in life sciences. Can you describe your progression from computer science to life sciences and what you see the parallels are and what you're excited about in terms of the future. Sure. So, um you might wonder from that introduction, you know, what is the guy running a payments company doing up here? So when I was a teenager, he said growing up in Ireland my ambition was to be a scientist and I devoured all sorts of books about science and I was really interested in physics and mathematics and then I discovered computers and all the rest, but kind of my my teenage vision was to kind of go in that direction and then I discovered when I went to college that I am I I wasn't cut out for physics, I wasn't good enough, frankly. Um I I you know had the experience that I guess many of us have had in college and you know, meeting the people are just like so clearly, so much better than you, you start to kind of reconsider your life choices. Uh so and but you know I really loved programming computers and so fell into the internet sector and all the rest. However, a lot of, a lot of my uh you know people I knew from college and even those that I knew beforehand pursued a scientific career and I, you know, I I stayed close to many of them and I followed the science and all the rest and actually there was a particular um girl who I met Um in uh in 2005 at a science contest in Moscow. I was 16 or 17 um who who has the last week is now my wife uh and um I have to be careful at times to be confident. Yeah. Um and uh and that is that that woman is is Silvana who you just mentioned another co founder of Arc. And you know when we were literally 16 we were discussing you know all sorts of ways you could do science and projects and all the rest and um, and she unlike me continued with science and kind of threw her. I've come to understand a little bit of the possibilities of uh the the current point that we the precipice that we sit at in in biomedicine. And you know whether it's uh new genome engineering techniques or new you know the new microscopy and imaging uh new data sets that are now being assembled that sort of enabled correlations to be gleaned. You know even where the signal would have been traditionally hard to extract um machine, you know all the stuff that you've heard a lot about today. And so um you know the Um it's at this point perhaps a cliche but I think it's a cliche for a reason that that which software technology, the Internet was for the last 40 years. Um if you think about, you know what, across the landscape today has the same characteristics, you know, I think many people with a lot more knowledge than me are betting on biomedicine. Great, great. What what do you hope to that art will accomplish in the next five years and 10 years and the privilege of talking with you and Silvana from the early days when you had the vision for arc and it's it's been so inspiring to learn about your vision for it. But maybe you could describe what led to the founding of the institute and and also we should probably say that Arc is a medical research organization. So it's an independent five oh one C three with university affiliations, but very much um you're creating this from whole cloth. So where would you like it to be? Five years from now? Well, and so art comes from a whole bunch of things that that you just mentioned in your introduction. So, um, you know, part of him, Yeah. If you look at the history of, you know, research and biomedical research over the last 100 years, 150 years, you see that's taken all sorts of institutional forms. It's been funded in different ways, different kinds of institutions, entities, different places were kind of preeminent at different times and so on. Since um since the Second World War, kind of the, you know, the decades after, we've kind of standardized on this kind of basic research model here in the U. S. You know, substantially funded by the NIH and so on. And that's a you know, it's a very effective model. We've made all kinds of incredible discoveries and all sorts of uh you know amazing breakthroughs have ensued. Um But if you talk to scientists Uh and you just asked them kind of how effectively they're enabled um and what perhaps they wish they could do that they can't pursue. Um you don't hear that everything's great. And you mentioned fast grants. This grant program, we ran through the pandemic. So we set it up in April of 2022. Just hopefully with the aim of unlocking um you know, projects that perhaps you know, existing funding agencies wouldn't be able to get to, you know, as quickly as we might want. You know, during a global catastrophe. We ran a survey of the scientists we funded through fast grants um towards towards the end of it. These are people who weren't working on coronavirus is you know, before the pandemic. And we asked them if you could do anything you want uh with your current funding. So not if you have more money just that you could do anything you want with your current funding. Um how much would your research program changed? And we thought well you know, maybe maybe a third of scientists might be interested in doing something substantially different. Four of the five scientists told us that if they could spend the research funding with kind of full flexibility that their research program would change a lot, four out of five scientists. And so, you know, so much about the landscape in the US, again, with the likes of science and biomedicine is incredible. You know, the best people in the world want to come here, they're trained incredibly well, They go to these phenomenal universities and so on. Um, but there's kind of this, this kind of peculiar point of constriction where we don't then do a great job of enabling them to pursue that, which they and their own judgment, I think they're they're sort of best uh suited to uh, to to investigate. So Arc is basically an effort to work backwards from the needs of scientists and just kind of um, you know, with with stripe rolls, encouraging people to focus on the user. You know, we work backwards from a small little startup. Getting started, we try to figure out what do they need to grow their business? Are kids doing the same thing from the standpoint of the scientists and so, you know, what do they need? Well, they would like the flexibility to pursue whatever. Um they would they would like to do, they would like, you know, particular kinds of platforms and equipment and, You know, technologies and so forth and, you know, and so in short for mark is an effort to assemble those, that's what we hope to achieve in five or 10 years. Um you know, I think it's, I think it's dangerous to be too prescriptive with, with basic research, you know, the whole point, you don't know where you're going to go. Um and the scientists will themselves set the goals, I guess Our goal for for 10 years is that the scientists tell us themselves that they think this is the place in the world where they can be best enabled and where they have the greatest prospect of doing, but, you know, they think could be the best work in their careers and and just one last point I'll say, because it shouldn't go unmentioned is, you know, I think there's a big, you guys might have noticed that in sort of Silicon Valley, there's a bit of a, you know, a strain of, you know, well, and we can do it all ourselves and we know better than everyone else and, you know, it's it's rarely accused of excessive humility. Um and um, you know, Arc is, As you mentioned, and kind of 501 C3 MRO, but it's done in partnership with stanford and Berkeley and UCSF and you were very, it wouldn't work if not for that. And just I think it's as I describe it, I don't want to make it sound like it's sort of a repudiation of dash, which already exists. Our goal is for it to be sort of a complimentary configuration that you know, builds with and on top of you know, so much of the jewel of civilization that american universities represent and we're honored to be a partner with you and Silvana and Patrick. And one of the concepts in art is is the formation of cores. And you've spoken when we've talked a lot about bilingual people and rather than having, you know, the data scientists over here and the scientists over here that the the two groups are multiple groups are actually interlinked and collaborating and truly thinking in parallel and convergent ways. How do you envision that coming out and and given your background in technology, what do you see the core technological infrastructure to be at art? Yeah. So one of the, sorry I mentioned, you know, one of the backs with arc or one of the kind of founding hypotheses is the importance of scientific freedom and of enabling people to pursue curiosity and research. The 2nd 1 is um you know, the the kind of contemporary model of a research lab, it's you know, an investigator and they set the research agenda. There's some grad students and postdocs and all the rest of everything that folks here are familiar with. Um uh you know, that is an effective model for many kinds of discoveries. But those increasingly biomedicine requires um what we've discovered all these amazing techniques, you know, cryo am or or you know, CRISPR screens or who knows what and and it's pretty tough for any individual lab to integrate a whole bunch of these different technologies and techniques because they require a lot of specialization and you know, domain knowledge and and so forth. And so maybe it's a lab you can specialize in one or maybe you're, you know, if you're awesome, maybe even two of these these techniques, but if you have an idea for a research program that might integrate and synthesize four or five of those, it's very difficult to do. And so with art we're gonna have these internal technology platforms that are focused on advancing, I mean they don't have a research agenda per se, they're focused on advancing the state of the art in some domain imaging or or in uh genome engineering and screens and so forth. So things like that. And the biggest opportunity we see that we see there is actually in software engineering, in that. The one thing that I was really surprised about, as I got to know, you know more about this landscape is there are very few software engineers working in in kind of basic um research labs and universities and that that could be for two reasons. One is, well maybe they're just not that useful, right? Um uh or the second would be just some kind of inefficiency there and as we kind of dug more into it, you know, I think there's part just like a kind of a bit of a cultural gap kind of like what you said for, you know, the two sides don't really understand each other perhaps as as much as would be desirable. I think part of it is also you know kind of uh you know prosaic but it's about things like you know how the pay scales work and you know how you know the technology industry booms, it's kind of pulling in a lot of the software engineers who you know might otherwise be able to um to contribute meaningfully to science. So anyway part of our goal with arc is to you know, build a really effective software engineering platforms. So that inasmuch as there are programs and projects that could benefit from augmentation with um sophisticated data analysis or you know, novel tools or ai and ml and everything else that you know, we can really kind of turbocharge the work with that compliment. Great others also who have been successful in technology, that chan Zuckerberg bio hub, for example, we're seeing a lot of interest in life sciences from people who got their start in technology. You you indicated some of the reasons why you thought that might be the case, but could you expand a little bit more on that? And but there does seem a natural attraction for people who have been highly successful in internet based technology now gravitating towards life sciences and and human health. Well, Silvana always tells me that she's surprised that people do anything else. It's like, what could be more interesting than, you know, biology research. Um uh you know, I think um I think actually, what's strange is we went through a period where this wasn't happening uh like, you know, between 18 61 and 18 91 9 of the current top 20 US universities were founded. So like a 40 year period where, you know, we're just big into founding universities that, you know, turned out to to become quite incredible. And if you look at, you know, who funded them and kind of where that came from and in each case, you know, it required sort of visionary founder, such president and you know, all that like it takes a village. Um, but you know, caltech was the um, throop University founded by Amos Troop. It was a Chicago businessman. And you know, johns Hopkins was well, you know, johns Hopkins and uh, and you know, Rockefeller was uh, was behind the University of Chicago and so forth. And so for reasons I don't really understand, say for the subsequent century, there wasn't a lot of founding of, you know, these kinds of entities and, you know, I don't think there was none. You obviously some some great things happening at the Salt and Hope and the broad Institute more recently, etcetera. Um, but for whatever reason, it kind of dissipated. And so I see arc, if it works and you know, look at, as you mentioned, started in december of last year. So I don't sound like we're, you know, claiming any success. But you know, if it works, I think it's more trying to get back to that, which the US has been really good at. And I know, I guess there was a, from my standpoint at least civic mindedness and a desire to faster, you know, society wide progress that motivated some of these people. And that seems to me like a good thing to do. Absolutely well in closing, you're a voracious reader, I've seen the table in your living room, which is packed high with books. Um, what one or two books would you recommend related to what we've been talking about this afternoon that you found particularly inspiring or informing. Um got a whole bunch of the science biographies are are really good. I mean folks here know that, but I just read Eugene Brown Walls and or rather the book about them, you know, the sort of discoverer of a surprisingly large fraction of sort of modern cardiology. Um, and actually the books about the founding of and actually I just read um, last week and this is a bit more sort of bio tenke but billion dollar molecule, the history of vertex. I thought that was a really terrific book and the vertex story is pretty remarkable. And, but the other genre that I really recommend that was a lot more entertaining and fascinating than I expected. There's a whole set of books about the founding of of of those 19th century universities. And so um there's a there's a pretty good one about Uchicago. There's a good one at caltech. There's a whole set of them about M. I. T. Um johns Hopkins etcetera. Um uh you know kevin stars written much about about stanford. Um Clark Kerr wrote a whole bunch of books about the U. C. System. Uh And uh you know I think I suppose to us and certainly you know to me when I was growing up you know these universities feel like omnipresent ancient pillars of society right? It's like was there ever a time without a stanford? You know? Um And and you know and yet as you dig into the particulars of the stories, it was people who we're motivated and inspired by sort of some of the you know early instances of uh of discovery and uh um and invention who thought that the U. S. Could be a far better country and a far more prosperous place than it then was. And you know this is the U. S. Was a much more kind of agrarian uh and uh you know obviously far less advanced place back then. But you know somehow they're really motivated by this kind of captivating prospect. And so that the those histories I found in almost every single case surprisingly inspiring. That's wonderful. Patrick, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Mhm.