Life Sciences DNA Podcast

A Pragmatic Path to AI-Enabled Commercial Operations

Tris Pharma Chief Commercial Officer Manesh Naidu sits down with Nagaraja Srivatsan to discuss how the small but growing specialty pharma company is pursuing a deliberately incremental AI strategy, focusing on its biggest pain points rather than chasing grand, enterprise-wide transformations. He explains how the team is using off-the-shelf and vendor tools where possible, rigorously managing data and compliance risk, and letting quick wins in discrete use cases pave the way for broader change. Naidu discusses what practical AI adoption looks like for Tris, how the company is applying the technology to high-value commercial challenges, and how it is reinventing sales training through virtual physician simulations.

Reimagining Scientific Work in the Age of AI Agents

Shweta Maniar, global strategy and market leader for life sciences at Google Cloud, sits down with Nagaraja Srivatsan to unpack what it takes to turn AI pilots into durable, enterprise-wide impact. A former biotech executive who now helps biopharma leaders modernize their data and AI strategy, Shweta argues that success starts with fixing fragmented data foundations and reshaping culture—not just deploying the latest model. She explains why AI should be treated as a strategic upgrade to de-risk science rather than a narrow tool for squeezing efficiency, why the hardest problems are less about model performance and more about data and organizational behavior, and how emerging multi-agent systems could compress timelines from discovery to patient access. You can download The ROI of AI in Healthcare and Life Sciences report referenced in the discussion here: https://cloud.google.com/resources/content/roi-of-ai-healthcare-life-sciences

Orchestrating Scientists, Data, and AI to Discover New Drugs

Scotch McClure had a bold plan for Maxwell Biosciences to map and mine the roughly 3 percent of peptides circulating in human plasma. The company has harnessed AI to move from a massive and messy universe of human peptides to a small-molecule candidate that could offer a potential alternative to antibiotics, antifungals, and some antivirals. McClure, CEO of Maxwell, sat down with Nagaraja Srivatsan to discuss why he thinks AI is becoming the central engine that makes modern drug development not just faster but possible at all, how he sees AI as essential to filtering out the noise in vast datasets, and why organizations will need to surrender more of the scientific process to AI while constraining it with a clear vision and guardrails.

Scaling Practical AI Across Commercial Teams

Drew McCormick, head of data and analytics at Eversana, sits down with Nagaraja Srivatsan to trace the company’s AI journey from classic predictive modeling in its data and analytics business to an enterprise-wide strategy. He describes how Eversana is building on a strong data foundation to tackle challenges such as patient identification, while also rethinking workflows, governance, and talent to ensure AI delivers value in a highly regulated environment.

Building an AI-Ready Biopharma Organization

Scott Cenci, chief information and data officer for Acadia Pharmaceuticals, sits down with Nagaraja Srivatsan to discuss how generative and agentic AI are reshaping biopharma throughout the enterprise from R&D and clinical development to the commercial field. He discusses how it is changing the roles of people like medical writers into medical editors, why every knowledge worker will soon manage AI agents as part of their job; and the hard problems leaders face in prioritizing AI investments, avoiding experiment fatigue, governing enterprise data, and building a culture of continuous learning.​

Automating Biopharma Workflows with AI and Robotics

Karthik Raman, co-founder and CEO of Persist AI, sits down with the Nagaraja Srivatsan to discuss how robotics, AI, and cloud tech are supercharging drug formulation to address a bottleneck in pharma R&D. He explains how robots outperform humans in consistency and scale, igniting a flywheel of faster prototyping, richer data, and AI-orchestrated workflows that will propel biopharma innovation amid rising drug complexity.

De-Risking Discovery and Improving the Success Rates of Drug Development with AI

Gabi Tarcic, vice president of product for Evogene, sits down with Srivatsan Nagaraja about applying AI to small molecule drug discovery, the cultural and operational changes required for researchers to adopt these tools, and how AI-driven platforms can improve the efficiency of pharma R&D.

Agents of Change: Creating Regulatory Documents with AI

Anita Modi, CEO and founder of Peer AI, joins Srivatsan Nagaraja to discuss the transformative impact of agentic AI on document creation for pharmaceutical companies. She discusses the cultural challenges of integrating AI into a traditionally cautious industry, the need for change management, and why it’s critical to embed human judgment alongside machine intelligence.​