The Cave: Pharma's Data Problem

Dave Johnson’s first pharma job wasn't in a lab. It was in a room, dark and cramped, stacked floor to ceiling with 30 years of decaying discovery chemistry data on every storage medium imaginable.They called it “the cave.”A physicist turned data leader, Dave has spent two decades solving the same problem: scientific data is generated for one purpose, poorly captured, and left abandoned.Now co-founding Dash Bio after years leading data science at Moderna, Dave joins Thomas to make a case the industry would rather not hear: AI pilots keep failing because organizations can't understand their own data or tell whether anything they build improves how they work.Listen in to hear:Why "the cave" is still an accurate description of how most pharma companies manage dataWhy clinical trial numbers mean nothing without the metadata behind themHow the US needs to treat China’s clinical trial volume as a wake-up call