Episode: 46 - Eric Schadt on Building AI-Native Drug Development And Patient-Facing Care

Trends from the Trenches host Eleanor Howe sits down with computational biologist Eric Schadt—now an AI Scholar in Residence at Pfizer—who has spent 25 years pushing a simple idea with huge consequences: disease is a network property, not a single-gene problem. That mindset changes what “precision medicine” should mean, shifting the goal from better labels to better treatment decisions that actually improve outcomes for real patients.

They get concrete about how the AI revolution lands inside pharma and biotech. Eric explains what Pfizer’s new AI Scholar role is meant to do, what an AI-native R&D operating model looks like, and why tightly integrated teams of a few humans plus modern foundation models can outperform the old way of working. From multimodal oncology models to reasoning-first LLMs, they talk about agentic systems that can orchestrate many specialized models, not just generate text, and why interpretability and auditable traces matter when clinical decisions are on the line.

If you care about AI in healthcare, precision medicine, clinical decision support, and the future of personalized treatment, this conversation will sharpen how you see the obstacles and the opportunities.
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Bio-IT World's Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider's look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders. The hosts bring years of industry experience in science, data, and technology to conversations exploring what is driving data and discovery, and what's coming next.
Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders.