Anna Greka

I think that there's a lot of opportunity for AI to be used to make sense of, you know, our medical records, for example, and how we extract information that would tell us that this cohort of patients is a better cohort to enroll in your trial versus another.

You know, there are many ways in which we can make use of these tools.

Not all of them are, you know, there yet, but...

I think it's an exciting time for being involved in this kind of work.

Yeah, I think that's an excellent question.

Of course, having patients as our partners in our research is incredible as a way for us to understand the disease, to build biomarkers, but it is also exactly creating this kind of emotional conflict, if you will, because, of course, to me, honesty is the best policy, if you will, and so I'm always very honest with patients and their families.

I welcome them to the lab so they can see just how...

you know, long it takes to, you know, get some of these things done.

Even today with all of the tools that we have, of course, there are certain things that, you know, are still quite slow to do.

And, you know, even if you have a perfect drug that looks like it fits into the right pocket, there may still be some toxicity.

There may be other setbacks.

And so I try to be very honest with patients about the road that we're on.

small molecule path for the toxic proteinopathies is on its way now it's partnered with a pharmaceutical company so it's on its way hopefully to patients um of course again this is an unpredictable road things can happen as you very well know but i'm at least glad that it's sort of making its way there but to your point and you know i'm in an institute where crispr was discovered and base editing and prime editing were discovered by my colleagues here

So we are, in fact, looking at every other modality that could help with these diseases.

We have several hurdles to overcome because in contrast to the liver and the brain, the kidney, for example, is not an organ in which you can easily deliver nucleic acid therapies.

But we're making progress.

I have a whole subgroup within the bigger group that's focusing on this.

you know, organized in a way where they're running kind of independently from the cell biology group that I run.

And it's headed by a person who came from industry so that she has the opportunity to really drive the project the way that it would be run, you know, milestone driven, if you will, in a way that it would be run as a therapeutics program.

And we're really trying to go after all kinds of different nucleic acid therapies that would target the mutations themselves rather than the cargo receptors.