JPM2026: Broadening AI drug discovery to include the lab, with Yann Gaston-Mathe

At the JP Morgan Healthcare conference this year, a lot of the discourse around AI drug discovery focused on making the leap from purely in silico drug discovery operations to real-world operations that are able to incorporate wet lab data in an iterative way. This is easily said, but to do it requires innovating new processes and infrastructures. On the sidelines of the show, pharmaphorum’s Jonah Comstock caught up with Yann Gaston-Mathe, founder and CEO of Iktos, an AI drug discovery company that just signed a billion euro deal with Servier to put this technology into action. In this quick dispatch from JPM (and we apologise for the shaky audio), Gaston-Mathe describes this shift in AI drug discovery, why it needs to happen, and what it takes, as well as giving some insights on why Servier and Iktos are a good fit as partners. “You need to think about how effective you are in the transition between the in vitro world and the in silico world,” Gaston-Mathe says. “Building on the data which is available is not enough.” You can listen to episode 242 of the pharmaphorum podcast in the player below, download the episode to your computer, or find it - and subscribe to the rest of the series – on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Podbean, and pretty much wherever else you download your other podcasts from.